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I'm a relatively novice Mac developer who's done most of my work in AppleScript and AppleScript Studio. (See my website, http://www.wordtech-software.com/aqua.html for some samples.) I started with these tools to get familiar with programming logic and GUI development, and I've also done some brief learning with C just to get the feel for it. Now I'm interested in learning things that will run on multiple platforms. I'm in the process of studying Tcl/Tk, and also plan to look at C++ (Qt), Java (Swing) and Python (wxPython).
I ran across Rev and downloaded the demo, and have played with it a bit. It's very intriguing--on just about an hour of playing with it, it seems very similar to AppleScript Studio in many ways, and the cross-compilation--Windows, Mac Classic and OS X, Linux, and every flavor of Unix under the sun--is really slick. This is clearly a serious development environment. I could spend a *long* time learning this toolkit, and it feels comfortable enough to make that process enjoyable.
However, because Rev, unlike the other languages and toolkits I'm looking at, is a commercial toolkit and would represent a fairly substantial investment on my part for what is a hobby (as opposed to a professional investment), I'm wondering if some of the more seasoned developers on this list would mind answering a few questions:
1. How closely does Rev resemble AppleScript--not in terms of its hooks into the Mac OS, but on a more general scale--its syntax, its programming logic, etc.? Does a background in AppleScript and AppleScript Studio lessen the learning curve somewhat?
2. How does Rev compare to other cross-platform toolkits such as Qt and Java/Swing? Does it have limitations over what these other systems can do? Does it have advantages?
3. How does Rev compare specifically to other scripting languages, especially Tcl/Tk and Python/wxPython? I'm studying Tcl/Tk out of a slightly contrarian nature, as I know the GUI's that can be built with Tk are more limited; wxPython, by contrast, is very rich. Can anyone with experience with either of these development environments offer some insight about how they compare to Rev?
4. Documentation. I note that Rev seems to come with fairly comprehensive documentation built-in--the API reference, Transcript dictionary, and some basic tutorials. I found it a bit hard to navigate, although this may be something that can be overcome with a greater investment of time. However, Apple has both a very complete (300+ plus pages) API reference for AppleScript and AppleScript Studio, and detailed introductory materials, that made learning AppleScript very easy. I also note that there is a large pool of third-party documentation on AppleScript, both informal (websites) and formal (O'Reillly books). The same is true, especially, for Qt, Tcl/Tk (I just spent $60 on two nice Prentice Hall books on Qt and Tcl) and of course Java. By contrast, I haven't noticed a large pool of documentation for Rev outside of that which comes with the application. Is it out there, and I just haven't seen it? Is there an O'Reilly book in the works? I guess I'm curious as to what additional independent resources there are for learning Transcript apart from what comes with Rev itself.
I appreciate any advice anyone can give me!
- -- Kevin Walzer, PhD WordTech Software--Open Source Applications and Packages for OS X http://www.wordtech-software.com http://www.smallbizmac.com http://www.kevin-walzer.com mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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