On Dec 8, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
David Bovill wrote:
My experience too - it has been the only way I have ever
succeeded interesting any truly bright under 25 year olds - the
main thing that puts them off is the lack of an open source
strategy. They go yeah this is great - but is it open source? Now
it does not need to be open source to convince them - they just
need to see how it can not just fit in, but be a Revolutionary
part of all those cool open source projects they are dying to get
their teeth into.
Okay, I'll bite: what exactly is an "open source strategy" for an
engine which is, and will likely remain, closed-source?
Richard,
A recent experience I had illustrates, I think, what David means.
Earlier this year I was writing a room scheduling application in Rev.
One of the features was that people who requested to schedule the
room had to be officially associated with the university. The obvious
answer was our enterprise LDAP server (open source technology). Rev
can't query LDAP directly, but BSD Unix (open source) has a utility
called ldapsearch. PHP (open source) can also do LDAP searches. I
opted for the latter, because that made my project easier to take
cross platform. So I found an open source PHP script that would do
the search and return the results as HTML (an open source protocol).
I deployed the script on our apache web server (open source) and used
a Rev 'get URL <url>' command to grab the results, which I easily
parsed in Transcript to get exactly what I needed. When my app
verifies, from LDAP, that the requester is officially permitted to
schedule, it records the scheduled event in a mysql database (open
source).
I have other Rev apps that have similarly pulled together disparate
technologies quickly and easily into a Rev front end. In my opinion
this is an area in which Rev excels--as a rapid development platform
for writing front ends to other technologies. In effect, Rev
increases the power and reach of the latter, showing itself to be an
easy-to-learn "glue" for open source stuff that's often opaque to non-
propeller-heads.
My $.03 (inflation, you know.)
Devin
Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University
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