Yes, I could use externals or you could argue that rev is UI/multimedia-centric and not intended for serious scientific computing, but does that have to mean that it could never be?
Why not just use Revolution for all the things that it is good for and then pass the rest of the nasty stuff over to another app?
On the Mac, you can AppleEvents to send the data (or even via a file) to another app that is faceless and this will work for both OS X and OS 9. If you want cross platform, then implement something using sockets to communicate XML data back and forth.
That way, you can have a natively compiled app that can multitask and do all the heavy hitting, without having to compromise on the time taken to develop a good user interface and operating environment.
The interesting thing will be if you have faceless BSD command-line type apps, you can fork multiple instances of that process and return the results, while you still have a front end that is free for the user to do other things.
I've done that kind of stuff before using Supercard and a C++ app running in the background and I didn't have to tie the front end to waiting for something to be completed before I allowed the user to do something else. I would think that this is a good way to go as Revolution doesn't support multiple threads of execution at this point in time.
The whole front end can be event driven in that once the faceless app finishes, it could send an AppleEvent back and this triggers the front end to do some appropriate handling and transformation of the results into something that it can use for display purposes.
That being the case, you could in theory have 1 front end app and have the these background apps run on multiple machines on the network and this would be very nice for scientific apps that may need quite a bit of computing.
I had a front end control a whole network of kiosk macs using AppleEvents before and everything was done via one single machine using a stack based interface. I even went so far as to Timbuktu remotely via a dialup connection into that administration machine to control the entire network remotely without having to travel 30 miles to get to that location.
I would suggest opening your mind up to the possibility of using Rev on the front end and using RealBasic, Objective C or whatever you wish on the backend and have a client-server type configuration. All this can be easily done using Revolution and RealBasic in concert.
Jesse _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
