Revolution IS rock-solid

[opus.species at wanadoo.fr]

A discussion started about the "rock-solidity" of Revolution

>>> Scott Rossi wrote:
>>> While I can't say I've pushed the engine as hard as the combined 
>>> talent of
>>> this list, in my experience the engine's performance has been 
>>> exceptional.

>> When the general assumption among the community is that the engine is 
>> perfect, then bug reports are considered spurious.
>> ...
>> The best way to make the engine rock-solid is to knock over the idol.
>> Dar Scott

> Nobody said perfect. Rock-solid does not mean bug-free. No program that 
> has some complexity ever is. But MetaCard crashed barely ever (I found a 
> couple ways to crash it but I was pushing it), most features worked as 
> expected, and bugs were addressed in a reasonable time. I don't think we 
> are trying to idealize/idolize MC. It was not perfect. But we want Rev 
> to reach its level and better.
> One significantly different thing about Rev is that not all 
> features/functionality are implemented in the engine. And Rev team added 
> a whole bunch of new stuff on top or next to the old stuff (when the two 
> were developed in parallel). And Rev's IDE is so much more complex and 
> introduces a number of kinks and funky behaviors that go away when it is 
> turned off.
> Robert

For people new to this list, i mean that it is important to be clear on 
the topic "can they be confident in deciding to use revolution for a 
professional project".

When i produce cd-rom, i use Revolution 8 to 12 hours a day for weeks. 
"Rock-solidity" is a key feature for me.

First short and after longer.

SHORT
For me Revolution 2.12 is Rock-solid and i can rely on it for days and 
days of work.
Metacard 2.5 was rock-solid. Revolution 1 was not.

LONG
When you use a development tools professionaly, there are 4 levels of 
problems what can arise
1) your file is corrupt, all your work since the last incremental backup 
is lost
2) there is an internal bug in the develoment tools forbidding your 
application to work
3) there is a bug between the development tool and then system environment 
forbidding your application to work
4) there are crashes in the development tools, you have sometimes to stop 
and restart

My findings

1) about file corruption
File corruption was frequent in Hypercard and Supercard ; you had to keep 
incremental backups very often.
I never had a file corruption neither with metacard nor with revolution.
OK i still continue top make incremental backups because i am used to, but 
now it is mainly to prevent an hypothetical failure of my hard drive...

2) internal bug
I do not know about any internal bug neither in Metacard nor in 
revolution. And if one was discovered, i can be confident that it would 
solved in a very short time.

3) bug between the development tool and the system
Metacard was famous for its ability to bug with the video drivers. It was 
at the time of mc 2.2. At a certain time all these problems disappeared (i 
believe that it was with mc 2.3 or 2.4 ; i suspect that at this time Scott 
Raney got new libraries to manage jpeg decompression). For me this bugs 
belong to the past and i did not meet them for years now.
Some people on this list reportted bugs in the managment of sockets ; 
other people use daily sockets without trubble for pop, smtp, ftp...
On such a new matter it is difficult to say where the problem lie : in 
Revolution, in the quality of scripts, in the servers...
There are a lot of discussions on these topics on this list ; open source 
code is regularily given by successfull developpers.
I guess that the next release of Revolution will greatly improve socket 
managment.

4) crashes of the IDE
The Revolution 2.12 IDE is for me reasonably solid. Some days i do not 
crash once ; some days i crash one or two times (in a 8 to 12 hours 
work-day).
This is perfectly acceptable for a professional use.
I program on a Windows XP computer with 512 MO ram. For a professional use 
it is a minimum. On a lower computer, problem can arise from a short 
memory if you open Revolution in the same time as media editors, but thats 
a Windows problem...
The MC IDE was too ligth for beginners, fine for developpers, poorly 
documented ; the Rev IDE is suitable for beginners and for developpers, it 
is well documented. No IDE is perfect but the IDE of revolution is at 
least as good as the IDE of the other tools in competition.

That was just a testimony

Claude