revMedia 4 - a Revolution on the Web

First announced last year at the runrevlive'08 conference in Las Vegas, the RunRev team has unveiled the first public alpha of their revWeb browser plug-in - the easiest way to create RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) for use on Mac, Windows and Linux. [click here to read the press release]

And to top it off, the revMedia toolkit will be absolutely free. No longer do you have to cobble together an AJAX-based RIA using JavaScript in the browser and PHP or something else on the back-end; you can stop wondering why the Flash designer tool just doesn't think like you and me; gone are the days of pondering if Microsoft is going to cripple Silverlight on other platforms; and you don't even have to place bets on whether or not JavaFX is really such a splendid idea from server-focused Sun (the beleaguered company that is soon-to-be-gobbled-up-by-Oracle, if you're not keeping tabs on that platform).

This is it: start of with revMedia, and deploy to the web; move up to revStudio when you need to build desktop applications that are native for each platform and don't require a 50 MB runtime download; and move up again to revEnterprise when you need Oracle or SSL; and when you need easy hosting that uses the exact same language to create dynamic websites, On-Rev is your platform of choice.

To be frank, I've always expressed my dismay regarding browsers as a deployment platform for 'real' business applications. Maybe if XUL had taken off, building a feature-rich application running inside a browser would have made more sense. But including miles and miles of JavaScript to try and mimick a desktop app, that was clearly an impressive workaround, but still a hobbled experience.

So I'm glad to see that the Revolution has hit the web, and we'll see a renaissance of good ol' HyperCard: easy to program and easy to run. Keep up the good work, RunRev team!

Vive la Revolution!

It has been a busy month of April at the Runtime Revolution HQ - last week we witnessed the release of Revolution 3.5, with its data grid and behavior scripting, and this week they've announced the On-Rev web hosting initiative.

Since the unveiling of the RunRev web strategy at the runrevlive '08 conference, last year in Las Vegas, Rev-afficionados around the globe have been eagerly anticipating the day where they can do away with the mix-and-match (or should that be 'mismatch'?) of technologies needed to build modern, Internet-enabled applications.
With customers and end-users requesting applications that work on desktops and web-browsers alike, developers have been forced to use combinations of JavaScript, Flash, .NET, Java and a myriad of frameworks to deliver solutions where not all features might have been fully implemented accross the different client interfaces.

With the Revolution of the Future, developers will finally be able to build those same solutions with a comprehensive technology stack based on one language, and have it work as a desktop application or in a web browser, backed by business logic with database access on the server-side.
Java promised us this 15 years ago, and then kinda-sorta forgot about this promise. Granted, Java SE 6u10 finally fixed the Applets experience, and Java EE 5 definitely simplified server-side development; but in their panic to provide an alternative to Flash, they produced JavaFX with a new scripting language that doesn't even work like Java.

In short, I think the RunRev team has a winner on their hands - and I am definitely looking forward to putting these new Revolution technologies to good use.

Revolution Live '08 - redefining the web

Now that I'm back home, caught up on sleep a bit and am starting the happy-fun return of my internal body clock to the Central European Time Zone, it seemed like a good opportunity to blog about the announcements at the Revolution Live Conference.

The great news for Revolution customers around the globe, is that their web offerings are shaping up really well: a PHP-style server module for creating web applications, plus a web browser plug-in - talk about a slam-dunk by the Runrev team! 

This is the perfect answer to Adobe's trying to bring Flash to the desktop: anyone can now build Internet-enabled applications without having to struggle with ActionScript and tools that were meant for designers. Not that designers are illogical people - if they were clueless about putting two and two together, they wouldn't be able to pull off that AJAX stuff. 

Boy, am I glad I won't have to continue struggling with that HTML+CSS+JavaScript batter mix either, if I want to build a Rich Internet Application... Let's check how Revolution stacks up against all these technologies that are trying to win the next round of browser wars:

• AJAX is an interesting use of existing technologies, but in the end it's just another way to stretch what a browser can do. The fact of the matter is: the browser needs updating for it to ever become a true universal application platform.
  
• Flash started life as a way to animate vector graphics, and whatever people may tell you, that's still what it is - they don't even have real buttons, it's all simulated. Thank you, please don't come again.
• JavaFX is an interesting idea, but suffers from one major flaw: it is not Java. Which means that Java developers have to learn a whole new thing just to be with the times. If they really wanted it to become popular, they would have just provided a great applet builder, not this monstrosity.
• Silverlight is Microsoft's attempt to beat Adobe in the browser plug-in wars. So far, it doesn't really seem to be getting very far. Maybe around version 3.0 we can consider it a major force, but I'm sure that you'll have to update your Silverlight apps every single time the Redmond team decides to replace essential parts.

Some people may think that Revolution is focusing entirely on the multimedia market with this strategy, but they couldn't be further from the truth: this is the single largest opportunity in the history of Revolution to make it big in the world of Enterprise applications!

Of course, there will be plenty of multimedia Flash-like stuff built using this browser plug-in, and it should attract a whole new crowd of Revolution developers. But looking at the biz app developers now, Revolution is by far the most secure technology of the bunch: short of obfuscating your Javascript, your AJAX apps are wide-open for anyone to take apart and try to take advantage of.

The Revolution community can now deploy applications for those customers who want to see a browser user interface, and we won't even have to learn a new language. Likewise, the server module will serve as an application server gateway like we haven't had before.

And I can assure you that existing and future Quartam tools will help you get to the bottom of things: use the server module and Quartam PDF Library to dynamically generate documents for your web applications; and once Quartam Reports hits version 2.0, you'll be able to leverage this report generation tool on the browser platform as well.

Good times...