Chuck Pelto wrote: > I'm looking for information to help me consider Revolution as an option > for developing more sophisticated databases. I've just downloaded and > unlocked the 30-day example version. > > I'm very familiar with FileMaker Pro. I'm somewhat familiar with Access.
I've worked a lot with FileMaker, and my WebMerge product keeps me using Access now and then for testing. Welcome aboard. > Is there anything someone can point me to that provides a compare and > contrast analysis of Revolution to FMP? Most of the differences can be summed up as the trade-off between simplicity and flexbility. FileMaker does what it does very well, but to be honest with you after working with Rev my GUI requirements have been raised so high that FileMaker never survives the first round of tools evaluation for most new projects. I have one small FileMaker job lined up and maintain another, and everything else here for the last few years has been built with Rev. If you do a lot of scripting, the first thing to get acclimated to is that you're finally developing true event-driven apps. FileMaker's scripting pretty much has only two events to trigger scripts: selecting a menu and clicking a button. Revolution has the rich event suite from HyperCard and a good many more to support its expanded object model. The worst thing about it is you have to type. The best thing about it is you get to type. Revolution's scripting language, Transcript, lets you build apps as flexibly as 4D but with more readable syntax and in many cases fewer lines of code. Keep in mind that the Revolution engine is not a DBMS per se, but more of a general-purpose application framework, rather like a VM. While you can store small flat data sets in property arrays easily in native Transcript (I've done this for a few thousand records with good speed), if you need truly relational DBMS capabilities Rev gives you multiple options. All three packages (Express, Studio, and Enterprise) include interfaces for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Valentina, and ODBC. Enterprise gives you access to Oracle as well. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, so if you don't have a favorite at the start you'll want to learn a little about each to determine which one is best for the job at hand. You could even use FileMaker as your DBMS with Rev as the front-end via ODBC. And of course, when you're done and you want to share your app with others, with FileMaper you'll need to either make sure the other user has a FileMaker license or buy the $500 Developer Edition to build standalone apps. The $149 version of Rev lets you build standalones for one platform, and the other Rev packages let you develop and deploy on nearly all modern desktop operating systems. > Additionally, I've a few questions: > > [1] Are there plans to enhance Revolution's AppleEvent awareness? One > of the features I've benefited from with FMP is its robust > AppleScripting capability. It has been a life-saver via > inter-application activities. Automation of graphics generation helped > us reduce our head-count by 60% and product errors by 98% in the first > year of implementation. Currently I see few calls available in > Revolution's AppleScript Dictionary. On the plus side for FileMaker, it does have a robust AppleScriptable object model. But with only slightly different syntax you can often get the same or greater flexibility with Rev's "evaluate" and "do script" AppleScript commands. And to the degree that shift migrates code from the AppleScript interpreter to Rev's you should see quite a performance boost. For example, you mentioned automation of graphics generation: depending what that generation is doing you can probably do at least some of that right in Rev -- resizing, cropping, rotating, and more, with a full compliment of vector primitives like rectangles, ovals, polygons, lines and text fields. Most inter-app integration is done with "do script" anyway, triggering FileMaker scripts, Photoshop actions, etc. The one AppleScript limitation Rev has that can be problematic in some cases is that it currently only directly sends and recieves text data. AppleScript supports binary data types like lists, but these must be converted to text before Rev can work with them. Fortunately the cases where you're exchanging non-text data with other apps are usually few, and if you run into one I'll bet one of the AppleScript gurus here could help you with a workaround. > [2] If I do development work with the 30-day trial version, can my work > accomplished in that be opened with the live version? I trust so. But > just want to be certain. It would be a cruel tease otherwise. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
