Welcome to the conversation. I'm sure you'll be inundated with
responses. I'll try to keep mine brief, but I'm not always very good
at that. I write books for a living and sometimes my emails are book-
like.
On Jul 23, 2005, at 10:05 AM, J. Valle 1234web.net wrote:
Hi,
I've been playing for a couple of days with Revolution and Realbasic,
researching trought the lists, looking for the right tool to develop
cross platform commercial applications, but the main target platform
would be Windows and both tools looks specially focused on Mac OS.
First, understand my comments about RealBASIC apply to Version 5.5. I
have not looked at RB2005. I spent a fair amount of time looking at
RB vs. Rev before I made the commitment to Rev about two years ago now.
That said, I believe you'll find creating Windows apps on OS X much
easier and more direct with Rev than with RB. Rev's IDE runs on
Windows so you can, with the right license, debug, test and fix your
apps directly on Windows. Last time I looked, RB lets you *deploy* an
app on Windows but if it breaks, you have to go back to the Mac to
fix it and then re-deploy it. My guess is that would become tiresome
and inefficient in a real hurry.
Seems that Revolution has a loyal base of users but is less popular
than
Realbasic, also a lot more expensive, the way documentation is
organized
is not exactly intuitive and the main con is their exotic language and
programming paradigma.
You are correct that RB has a larger installed base. It's been around
a lot longer and has attracted quite a few Visual Basic refugees to
swell its ranks.
"Expensive" is in the eyes of the evaluator. I think that the total
cost of ownership (TCO) of a development tool is hard to forecast.
But my feeling is that RB would turn out in the long run to be more
expensive than Rev because of the xplat issues I mentioned above. The
longer it takes to develop and deploy an application, the more costly
the tool, regardless of initial price point.
The language in Rev may seem exotic to you (I take it you probably
come from a more conventional language background, perhaps even
Basic. By those standards, Transcript is different, perhaps even
exotic. But it's a VHLL (Very High Level Language) while Basic is an
HLL. This translates into two observations. First, you can often do
in one line of Transcript what would take several (perhaps many)
lines of Basic. Second, there's a lot more built into the language
than in RB. So very often you find that a single line/component in
Rev does what would take a lot of work in RB. When I used RB, I found
that I had to work out very detailed descriptions of code at a
relatively low level to write methods. In Transcript, I more often
than not just start coding and what seems like it should work just
does. Big plus.
That said, it's fair to say, too, that RB has true object orientation
in its language. If you're an object thinker like I am, that's a very
big attraction. One thing you can do in RB that you cannot do in Rev
is to create new classes or types of UI components and other objects.
Depending on your experience and approach and on your application's
needs, that may or may not be important.
Then the questions are:
- Why should choose Revolution instead Realbasic? comments from people
using both tools would be greatly appreciated
Above
- Is this a mature tool to develop cross platform applications?
The language and the engine are very mature, in fact I think they're
more mature than RB. The Revolution IDE still has quirks and bugs and
workarounds and is very much a relatively stable work in progress. I
have heard but cannot confirm from personal experience that RB 2005
-- which has been completely rewritten in itself -- has a lot of bugs
and issues in the IDE as well. Prior to that release, my assessment
would have been that the IDE in RB was somewhat more stable
principally from having so many more people beating on it.
- I suppose that maturity is not a problem for Mac, but what about
Windows and Linux?
See earlier comments re windows. Linux is farther along on Rev than
on RB by quite a but but frankly neither tool does all that good a
job there from what my limited testing and listening to this list
reveals.
- What are the differences between Studio and Enterprise version? a
comparison table on your site would help to decide.
I'll let someone from RunRev answer.
Thanks,
Jose
--
J. Valle 1234web.net <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
www.1234web.net
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