[REBOL] Re: Commercializing Rebol
From: gjones05:mail:orion at: 16-May-2001 10:15
From: "Ken Anthony"
<snip>
> When I'm working on something, I want all the pieces exposed and layed
out
> in front of me.
>
> When I give it to my customer, I want it in one package.
<snip>
And this is precisely how the TclKit-MetaKit combination works. Your
development files are laid out as you like them, but the TclKit
scripting document creator program combines them into a single,
executable file. The components are reached through the database
system. The end user only sees and deals with the one file in a typical
scenario (as always, there is a little more to the story...). It is
the concept on which I am focusing, and the concept seems very neat. It
also seems "doable" in REBOL, at least in principle. Problems remain;
this solution is hardly a panacea.
KA> I will worry about size and how to update. While in principle,
incremental
KA> updates are a neat idea, in practice it just leads to job security
in the
KA> support department.
Oh, so true. Just supporting my wife's cobbled together eBay and
website management scripts is more work than I care for it to be, but I
believe that a scripted document-type approach would be easier in our
case.
As an aside, one might ask why not just use Tcl/Tk and the
aforementioned package. I was going to, but I have this mental block on
the Tk model for a gui. I just never got up to speed in Tk, certainly
in comparison to /View VID.
This single, "scripted document" arrangement is a very compelling
concept to me, putting aside, for the moment, Petr K's well founded and
easily understood concerns. I have additional and, as yet, unexpressed
concerns and reservations. One is the idea that any data is ever
encoded in a non-directly readable format. Legacy problems become
built-in, and this seems to be a bad design choice make from the very
outset! I take some consolation that the solution mentioned is open
source, and that the binary is cross-platform compatible without need
for translation of endians, etc. I guess I always want my cake and to
eat it too. I want the information to be stored in a human-readable
format and yet quickly addressable and compressed!
--Scott Jones