jesse wrote:Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your reply. I did read the case study. I have another question I was first
turned onto runrev when I found Real Basic and wanted to see what other options
were out there. I haven't been able to determine why one would choose runrev
over real basic as they both appear to have similar features from the outside
looking in. Your thoughts on this?
That's a difficult question to answer succinctly! To some extent the differences depend on the type of application you're developing. If you're developing something that requires a feature that only one or other tool has, and there isn't a readily available plugin or external then you'll probably need to go with that tool. Beyond that I'll try to summarize what I think our main advantages are. Let me preface my response by saying that REAL Studio is a great product and many people create great solutions with it. I'll try to be fair in my response but of course I cannot claim to be unbiased.
There are two main areas that I believe LiveCode really excels in when comparing these products. The first is our approach to
workflow and the resultant productivity, and the second is
platform support.
LiveCode has a unique workflow in that you develop your application "live". Your application is always running, so there is no traditional edit, compile, run, debug cycle. Instead in LiveCode you edit code for individual objects and can instantly see the changes as soon as you hit Compile. LiveCode even preserves variable contents between compilations. This is one of those things you have to try for a while and get used to. It makes development much faster, and also easier. It is addictive, it saves a great deal of time and we know many developers who say they would never want to go back to developing any other way.
LiveCode also has a higher level language than REAL Studio - or just about any other competitor. REAL Studio is a high level language too and for some specific features it might beat us slightly, but for the most part you're going to be writing less code in LiveCode. In some cases it is an order of magnitude less. We haven't compared with them specifically in our text and data processing comparison page
http://www.runrev.com/products/livecode ... rocessing/, but a lot of what we have posted there does hold true when comparing this sort of environment.
LiveCode code is also
much more readable, an advantage that really comes into its own after you've owned it for a while and go back to try to read some of the code you wrote, or pass it off to another developer in your team.
LiveCode is really strong when it comes to developing the sorts of business application you're talking about developing. These applications tend to benefit greatly from the iterative development style, and use a lot of the very high level text and data processing components that are one of LiveCode's core language/feature advantages. We hear stories from our customers time and again that the platform cuts their development costs and time to market or deployment, sometimes by an order of magnitude. Another story we hear is of developers making a tweak or adding a new tool to their business productivity platform (including some additions with surprisingly sophisticated functionality!) in an afternoon, or a day. Obviously it depends on the complexity of what you're developing and many LiveCode solutions do take months to develop. But this ultra-rapid nature of development is something that is one of LiveCode's key strengths.
The LiveCode development environment is written in LiveCode, which means that as you get more familiar with it you can modify it, extend it or automate any aspect of your development process. This is great when you want to create your own test suite or custom editing tools that apply specific rules to objects. Again, that's not something that is possible with REAL Studio.
Perhaps one of the downsides that LiveCode has in this comparison is that it doesn't do as much to structure your project and code. That freeform nature is great for small utilities and ad-hoc tools, but if you want to develop a more sophisticated solution you do need to think about the design up front and carefully structure your project to enable good reuse of code (e.g. using object-oriented behaviors and libraries). There is nothing to stop you designing a truly great, scaleable application (there are LiveCode solutions developed by teams with millions of lines of code) but LiveCode doesn't hold your hand as much as might be ideal, so you do need to put a little effort in up-front.
The other benefit of LiveCode is our platform support. We've publicly stated our policy to cover popular platforms and devices and are shortly about to ship support for iOS - a project we've been working on over the course of this year. We have support for other mobile platforms planned and a good way down the development track, so they will come hot on the heels of the iOS launch. RealSoftware haven't got out of the starting gate on that front, though I know they are thinking about it. If you want to be able to deploy your point of sale solutions to an iPad or salespeople in the field, this is a key consideration. As you're probably aware, tablets are projected to outsell desktops by 2013.
I hope this is helpful and I'll be very happy to answer any further questions you might have. I do passionately believe what I've stated here and I know we have a great customer satisfaction rate with many customers that would agree. But as I've said, its not possible for me not to be biased so you should ask the same question in the RealSoftware community and make your own determination around the needs of your specific business. Good luck!