On Dec 8, 2005, at 11:41 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Devin Asay wrote:
On Dec 8, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Okay, I'll bite: what exactly is an "open source strategy" for
an engine which is, and will likely remain, closed-source?
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.
That's a wonderful example, but if I read it correctly it seems you
were able to do what you needed on your own, without RunRev lifting
a finger.
The main point is that Rev has the right hooks that make it easy to
pull together into a nice GUI a lot of open source technologies that,
by themselves, are kind of arcane for people like me. :-) It's one of
the things that makes Rev a powerful tool--it makes it easy to
leverage other powerful technologies with no modifications out of the
box.
I think it's a story we could do a better job telling, just like we
can do a better job of pointing out how Rev is a better platform for
creating web-based applications than any web browser. For instance, I
don't think I'll ever have my students create desktop-based
applications in my advanced Rev development class any more. Instead,
everything we build will be web-deployed. Of course, what that means
is I don't really have to change anything, since any stack can be
launched from a web server using just a minimal launcher app on the
desktop. The only change is presentation. Who knows, maybe I can even
entice some of the students away from our always-full PHP class.
("Learn rapid web app development with Revolution! Small classes, no
waiting!") ;-)
For myself, that's the sort of solution I prefer as well: the
fewer the cooks the sweeter the broth. I don't run their company
and they don't run mine, and we both like it like that.
I just appreciate Rev letting me borrow from other cooks' pots when
I'm cooking.
Devin
Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University
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