Rev Review

[Richard Gaskin]

I just sent this to MacWorld -- hopefully some portion of it will appear in
the Letters section down the road:

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Jason, Andy, and the rest of the gang -

As a professional developer making applications with Revolution (see
WebMerge's 4.5-mouse review in March '03), it was gratifying to see a good
review for Revolution 2.1 in the February issue.

With all the software Andy reviews it's not surprising that he doesn't have
the time for the sort of benchmarking that may have given him a more
favorable speed comparison to BASIC and AppleScript.  For many common tasks
Rev performs on par or better, since as a true fourth-generation language
most of the work is being done in highly optimized compiled C++; scripts are
merely the lightweight glue that links these compiled routines.

And that's the strongest advantage that the review didn't mention:
productivity.  One line of Rev's scripting language often accomplishes what
takes dozens in other languages.  For example, creating an alias is a
one-liner in Rev, but takes 18 lines in C, 55 lines in BASIC, and 247 lines
in Java.

Overall it was a great review that really emphasises the "write once, run
anywhere" value that Java promises and Rev delivers.  But I know Andy's a
tinkerer, so I wanted to encourage him to explore a little more if he has
some tinkering to do, as I think he'll be pleased with what he discovers.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site
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