Alex Rice wrote: > The questions I intended to bring up were: > > 1) In a technical interview, or when trying to sell an xtalk solution > to corporate IT dept, you may run into someone who challenges the > xtalk/smalltalk messaging model. I described in a previous post that > interview where the Java engineer was challenging me about Objective-C. > It's possible the issue will come up for other > xtalk/smalltalk/objective-C programmers too.
What is the argument against the xTalk messaging model? Can you think of a way to address those concerns while retaining the essential flavor of the language? Perhaps as an optional set of language additions, a la explicitVars? > 2) Is a tool that's really good for games and multimedia also a good > tool for making ultra-reliable business applications? There is an > saying something like: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks > like a nail. Can the 'All talking All singing All dancing' Runrev > really be the 1 true tool that we want it to be? I agree that "multimedia" is a poor choice to describe something like Rev. Though it can do multimedia, it can also do a lot more. The challenge is that it can do so many things, nerly as many as Java or C, and like those languages it's hard to define them in terms of types of software delivered using them. Maybe something like "media-rich applications" might be more on-target. Then again, I'm cautious of even attempting to define Rev by the stuff folks make with it today. There are so many things in the Rev VM I can't write apps as fast as opportunities arise for them. What can't you build with Rev? :) There might be a way to evagelize the tool by merely describing how it works, and let folks imagine what that means for them specifically. That may sound a little too California, but consider: As a general-purpose GUI toolkit, the range of examples should have something for just about anyone: database front-ends like Revzilla, downloadable dynamic content like RevNet, Web production tools like Hemmingway and WebMerge, media-rich databases like Rob Pitt's PEDiPac, qualitative analysis tools like HyperRESEARCH, AI tools lik Alex' CLIPS project, CBTs like Max Shafer's Spolin CD, and the list goes on. On Brian Thomas' "If Monks Had Macs" CD alone there are many different application categories represented: an e-book reader, a personal journal application, a text adventure game, a solitaire card game, and tons of "multimedia" like his piece on the White Rose. Heck, his Thinker Toy widget alone straddles at least two or three categories (you can see a screenshot of it at the lower-left of <http://www.rivertext.com/monks3.html>). All this, and still a thousand other software categories that simply haven't been invented yet.... Category labels may be unncessarily limiting, introducing boundaries for perceptions which might have remained broader just hearing something like: Java promises "write-once, run aywhere." Revolution delivers. Easily. Then exaplain it as a modern 4GL with with rich GUI support and an unbeatable ROI proposition. Now that you have their atention, show them case study after case study of people making or saving many times their development expense with Rev. How many times does an IT request get delivered long after it was useful? How many in-house apps get deployed but never used because it's hard to make great interfaces quickly in most other tools? How many projects are over budget? Rev projects are not immune to budget overruns, no software is. But because you're working at such a high level with Rev the range of things that can go wrong is smaller, and often the variance between estimate and actual cost is smaller accordingly. A 20-year ACM survey found 80% of software projects were over budget, with a variance of a factor of 16 (as low as one-forth the estimate, as high as four times as much). I have no doubt that among professional Rev developers the variance is much smaller. Containing that variance makes cost control possible. For open-mindered corporations who need to roll out usable interfaces effeciently, Rev has a lot to offer. Many decision-makers may not understand programming, but they do understand their bottom line. And that's where Rev shines most brightly. Let's hope we see a collection of case studies at the RunRev site soon. They've helped make many a happy story, they might as well tell a few... -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution