[REBOL] Re: Windows Crash
From: petr:krenzelok:trz:cz at: 2-Oct-2003 15:07
Steffen Kahr Pedersen wrote:
>Hi Gabriele & Bohdan,
>
>Thank you for your comments re commercial applications.
>
>I should be very happy to be convinced.
>
>I'm also curious as to what type af applications?
>
>Regards Steffen
>
Whatever ones :-) Your thinking should be lead in a following way - what
other tool would you use if it was not rebol? Are you familiar with such
tool? I expect we talk tools league of Delphi, VB etc. E.g. we used here
CA-Visual Objects (as I come from Clipper world). So, let's start with
pekr's rules :-)
- don't trust stupid argumenting such as - "if you use VB, don't even
dare calling yourself a programmer". Good coder would never tell you
such sentense, as he/she knows, that right tool at right time at your
hand is what matters. What is more - if you are not familiar with those
tools, forget you start utilising your tool easily. It does not matter
you know what is object programming about - you have to learn classes,
events, their logic, etc. If you already came to rebol, it is clear you
want to do some apps "your way". E.g. with VO, we scrapped all templates
and produced our logic - I hate those templates which can solve easy
cases for you, but once you go deeper and deeper in a problem, you
end-up with kludgy code. So in the end we had some small IS sales system
done. Do you think our users care what it was programmed in, or how
sophisticated object logic it uses? :-)
I use "minimalistic" aproach - ask yourself :
- does it work? If so, who cares what sophisticated tool you used -
users/customers don't!
- Is it fast enough? Now I mean mainly speed. There is old trade-off of
speed of scripting languages. Only morons can claim such things
nowadays, at least for general apps. Fast enough is simply fast enough.
I often can hear - but my C++ code would work 10x faster. Well, ppl
claiming so very often forget the fact, that today's PC is x times
faster than yesterday's server ;-) so - for general business apps, rebol
is more than ideal. Forget some video, sound capabilities - we are slow
and not there yet, forget writing MS Office clone using rebol etc.
- don't try to provide your app with native OS skins! Well - that is my
suggestion. I know some ppl think otherwise, but I can tell you, that my
ppl notice my apps, because they look slightly different. E.g. REBOL IOS
has very pleasant feeling - if it would have native Windows look - it
would just look as other windows based app ... so - use the difference
as your advantage!
- Does it behave consistently? And now take care! VID is still not
consistent in some cases. While I prefer different look of app, I know
that what ppl hate is different app behavior (I talk keyboard navigation
here). But there are some patches mainly from Romano, which help in that
area. And - after all - once you will become more fluent with View, you
can change lot's of things yourself.
- more styles - ask Cyphre for tree-view, list-view, tabs, menu etc
styles - they are very nice, even in beta. There was VID 1.3 community
effort but it is not finished. I know RT wants to do something in that
regard, as current VID stopped imo in some 80% of perfection (missing
styles, some inconsistencies, capabilities ...)
- time to market - I can bet that Rebol will allow you to very quickly
prototype your app. You will be designing it around your thoughts. Rebol
is first environment which provides me with such feeling. e.g. in VO I
had to wrap my thinking around strict object logic. Rebol is free-form.
- what rebol lacks a bit is simple built-in database (IIRC Gabriele did
something in that regard but I don't know its state). So it depends what
are your intentions. Rebol/Command has ODBC interface, using View/Pro
you can use Firebird wrapper and even with non-profi Rebol products you
can use e.g. Postgress and MySQL - we have cool folk called DocKimbel
here, who did really nice drivers ...
Enjoy reboling!
-pekr-
