Serious applications

A.C.T. albrecht at act-net.com
Wed Feb 25 09:20:23 EST 2004


Hi,

>>Anybody could point me to samples of "big" applications developed with
>>Revolution? Details? Reports? Links?
> 
> check out hemmingway, but i have a feeling the majority of large 
> projects are internal, or still being built..

being new to Revolution I won't be able to actually ANSWER the question. 
But perhaps my impressions can be a hint:
I think the GUI building system is quite good, to me it seems better 
than most GUI builders I know. There may be tools that have more bells 
and whistles, but creating a standard interface or even a somewhat 
"bloated" with Revolution is very productive.

What seems to be a major drawback, a REAL PROBLEM in my eyes, is the 
programming "language". I do not intend to call it "bad", don't get me 
wrong here - but you are talking about "big projects" (or "serious 
applications", which I cannot define). You would always have to have 
developers that can "talk transcript", which is not as likely as finding 
professionals that speak C, C++, Java etc. pp. Personally I find it very 
hard to "learn" Transcript (being a stubborn Assembler/machine 
language/C/C++/Shellscript/PHP programmer that hasn't learned anything 
serious) and currently this might be the reason for me to not use 
Revolution at all - to me this is a question of productivity: I have to 
learn a language that does not give me any benefits over those I am 
already familiar with AND I would have to limit external developers to 
those being able to handle this language as well.

When I am talking about "big projects" I am talking about 1-2 years of 
development time (full time) with at least 2 developers envolved. I do 
not know if this is the right scale for Revolution projects at all, but 
I am sure it could be considered possible.

So: Propably "serious applications" are not a problem to do with 
Revolution if you have the time and money to get your code-slaves speak 
Transcript. A well designed project only needs about 30% of time spent 
in writing code, the rest is concept, design etc - so the language is 
only a component of the "code processing" part of the project, with only 
is less than a third of the project, meaning: Revolution is just as good 
as any other IDE - and only just as bad as any poorly designed project.

Marc Albrecht
A.C.T. / level-2
Glinder Str. 2
27432 Ebersdorf
Deutschland
Tel. 04765-830060
Fax. 04765-830064



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