How popular is Revolution?

crag · Post by **crag** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 6:41 am

I hate asking this. Cause, frankly I never appreciated seeing questions like that one I'm about to ask on forums.

But, we just brought Revolution Enterprise. We like it. Have several trials running as well. Everyone likes it. Talking to day, trying to decide if we are gonna buy more copies. My big concern is exposure. I did a quick job search in the US and found nothing.

Now that doesn't concern me. I don't mind if the tool is popular in Europe or Asia and not in the US. I just want to make sure the company will be around for a few years. And other geeks are supporting them.

Reassure me, please. Tell me there's a decent sized user base and I don't see much action on the forums/net cause the tool is so great.

-Thanks

malte · Post by **malte** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 7:19 am

Hi crag,

I do not think anyone outside of the mothership has a real idea about the size of the userbase. However Runtime Revolution (The company) has been around for over a decade. My company uses their tools for over 7 years now. Knowing the lists and the forums since I started I know there is quite a bunch of oldhands, semihands and newhands that discuss frequently. Also new faces are showing up all the time, so I am not at all worried about the future of the company that delivers my favourite dev environment. Taking into account the amount of rev consulting I did and do over the years I can say that the amount of work grew exponentially over the last 3 years, putting me into a position where my own company had to grow, all based on Rev development. And the launch of the new on-rev.com service has me excited. I am now in a position where I can save a lot of money, just because I do not need to outsource PHP coding anymore, or at least not to that large extend. If you are looking for a paid day job as a Rev developer I guess you might have it a little bit harder, as the usual reaction in traditional IT is as follows:

You use what?
This is a toy, right?
-> IF I have the chance to demo the power of Rev discussion continues
So show me something that is easier as in XYZ
-> Me demonstrating chunk expressions
90% of the cases: WOW, show me more
-> Making an executable for Win, Mac and Linux with one click
*jaw drops*

This is a typical situation I have experienced over the years. It takes decision makers that are open minded to jump on the wagon, however I have convinced and trained more than one large company that then added Rev to the toolset. Sure, Rev has its downside and I went best with showing them in the early stages and rarely had a problem to convince people about the productivity which directly converts to saved pennies in those companies. Also, the software I design myself did quite ok on the market. I never did regret my decision to get into Rev. The only thing I do regret is that I did not discover it earlier.

Hope that helps a bit,

Malte

FourthWorld · Post by **FourthWorld** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 8:27 pm

IMO, the one area where RunRev Ltd. stumbles is in not communicating clearly just how big their user base is.

These pages help:
http://www.runrev.com/products/testimonials/overview/

But they're not nearly as comprehensive as they could be. For all the commercial applications based on Rev, there are thousands more in-house solutions used in business and academic organizations around the world, like the one described in this tutorial from Novell:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/1655.html

There's a healthy selection of third-party add-on products available from RevSelect:
http://www.runrev.com/products/related-software/

But those are just a small sampling of what the developer community has delivered. There are many dozens more excellent libraries available for free in RevOnline, but since many of those aren't also available on the web the actual number of Rev goodies is hidden from the rest of the world.

I wish I had time to catalog all the good stuff in the Rev world on this Links page at revJournal:
http://www.runrev.com/products/related-software/

The stuff that's there now is a very small sampling of what's available.

Hopefully the RunRev team will take up the opportunity to put together a comprehensive list of commercial and in-house Rev-based apps, third-party add-ons, and related web sites linked to in their main menu so it can be found from any page at their site.

In the meantime, just know that for everything you can see that indicates how big the community is, multiplying it by about ten will give you a fair understanding of what's really going on. RunRev doesn't have the marketing muscle of Adobe or Microsoft, but they've been around for more than a decade and have earned a healthy and enthusiastic following.

Bernard · Post by **Bernard** » Sun Apr 19, 2009 5:28 pm

It's very hard to judge the popularity of Revolution compared to other programming languages. Clearly the number of users is massively different to a language like VB, Java, Python, etc. It seems that small independent software companies are on a narrowing beach between the mountains of Microsoft's monopoly and the eddying seas of free software. In those circumstances, Revolution appears to be doing pretty well.

It is probably better to compare Rev with something like Rebol. When I was first looking at Rev about 7 years ago I also considered Rebol. I have no regrets in choosing Rev over Rebol. Rev has grown and gone from strength to strength whilst Rebol has at best stagnated, and is maybe dying out. In the last 7 years I continue to revisit the issue of development tools and in the last couple of years I looked at Flex/AIR and Laszlo, and decided against both even though they are free and Rev isn't.

One sign of the strength of the Rev community is these forums and the mailing list. The forums have only been around for 2.5 years, yet there are 13,000 messages (and from what I've seen they are overwhelmingly on topic). The mailing list goes back almost 9 years, and is archived here: http://mail.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/ . And for better or worse all those messages & emails are from users to users. And I suspect that Richard is right and the number of individuals who posts to the list/forums is probably a small percentage (I know of one person I personally introduced to Rev who never contacted the list/forums).

You may be unaware of the history of the technology behind Rev. I can offer some information about that (although other people like Richard know far more than me in this area). The technology underlying Rev was previously owned and developed by a company called Metacard, and I believe it has been in existence since the early 90s. For the first 5 years of the life of Revolution, both companies built IDEs based on the same engine, then about 5 years ago Runtime Revolution acquired the engine and continue to develop it. Indeed, there were other competing technologies around 7 years ago that are no longer around. So RunRev are doing something right.

There is an amazing amount of experience amongst those who participate in the lists - there are many who have over 2 decades of experience with Revolution, Metacard and Hypercard. They are very ready to help, and even after all these years there's barely a week goes by that I don't learn something new. Also for several years now there has been an annual developers conference initially run by users and latterly by RunRev themselves.

Of course there are bugs and annoyances with the technology. You are free to view those here: http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/query.cgi . And there are certainly decisions made by RunRev that I don't agree with, but I'm sure there are others who wouldn't agree with what I want. And it is their company and they must steer how they see best.

I hope some of that information helps you make your decision. Feel free to ask any other questions and I'm sure you'll get honest replies.

Perhaps if you elaborated on what you mean by 'exposure' we could give you more food for thought. I'm guessing that you think the issue might be where you would find additional developers to employ.

crag · Post by **crag** » Sun Apr 19, 2009 6:45 pm

Actually after joining the mailing lists I see there's an active community. All I needed to know. Thanks.

mwieder · Post by **mwieder** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 8:44 pm

It's hard to imagine developing in rev without the mailing list as a resource. It's without a doubt the best user community I've ever been involved with. And you can follow it on gmane or nabble as well.

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 5:10 am

The mailing list can be unruly at times when some of the big ego's there collide. They end up dominating the focus of the entire mailing list, which is a bit selfish of those who do it.

FourthWorld · Post by **FourthWorld** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 7:40 am

Garret, I checked out the links in your sig, and it seems that you and Bernard share my interest in Rebol. I can't say I spent a lot of time with it (their OS X build didn't come out for many years), but there's something about it that was quite fun.

I daydream about making RebolView in Rev, with an accompanying library so folks can use it to easily create and share mini-apps. That might be a fun addition to RevNet.

Do you still use Rebol? What do you like about it? Anything you find yourself wishing were in Rev?

espais · Post by **espais** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:22 am

I think the same, the user list and the forum are one of the best with difference.

Salut,
Josep

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 11:58 am

Hi,

I completely agree with Garrett, but I also wish that more "lurkers" on the mailing list would participate in the discussions to keep the general opinion balanced.

Best,

Mark

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 5:30 pm

FourthWorld wrote:Garret, I checked out the links in your sig, and it seems that you and Bernard share my interest in Rebol. I can't say I spent a lot of time with it (their OS X build didn't come out for many years), but there's something about it that was quite fun.

I daydream about making RebolView in Rev, with an accompanying library so folks can use it to easily create and share mini-apps. That might be a fun addition to RevNet.

Do you still use Rebol? What do you like about it? Anything you find yourself wishing were in Rev?

I personally just could not fully get into Rebol. While it is interesting, and even easy, it's also a just a bit too odd for me and my needs. But I leave a link to it for those who might have a need for it.

And I love your idea about making a RebolView from Rev. That might actually draw some Reb users over to Rev, or at least offer some of them a second language to their Reb.

FourthWorld · Post by **FourthWorld** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:10 pm

Garrett wrote:And I love your idea about making a RebolView from Rev. That might actually draw some Reb users over to Rev, or at least offer some of them a second language to their Reb.

I'm really attracted to the idea of a "Cloud Desk", the sort of mini-app sharing RebolView with a familiar desktop look and feel.

The problem I've had is I can't think of many practical uses for it. Yet. Give it some thought, maybe we could pull something fun together and put it into RevNet.

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 12:52 am

FourthWorld wrote:
Garrett wrote:And I love your idea about making a RebolView from Rev. That might actually draw some Reb users over to Rev, or at least offer some of them a second language to their Reb.
I'm really attracted to the idea of a "Cloud Desk", the sort of mini-app sharing RebolView with a familiar desktop look and feel.

The problem I've had is I can't think of many practical uses for it. Yet. Give it some thought, maybe we could pull something fun together and put it into RevNet.

You know, that is also something else that actually turned me off of Rebol. The idea of having to distribute this desktop(viewer) just for a single Rebol app seemed too much. All I wanted was the ability to simply make apps with Rebol and just distribute the app, not a viewer that resembles a desktop. It's great if you're a developer making Reb apps, but not for the end users.

But I believe now they have some sort of standalone gig for developers.

And I'll have to decline on any new projects right now. I'm already stretched out further than I'd like with projects right now. But! In a few months I should be open to toss this or anything else around. It'll help me hone back up on Rev again since my current projects have taken me to other languages the last 6 months.

And I have another one that I'd like to try in Rev eventually too. A standard type file manager with a treeview for directories and a grid style file view to the right of it. Please! Not another Norton clone either!!! So sick of Norton clones, as well, I don't like the dual pane setups anyway, unless it's an FTP program which I don't have to work with everyday.

Would you be open to maybe toss that idea around as well in the coming months?

Right now I'm working on a file manager using PureBasic. Mainly because it already had the explorer treeview and fileview built in. With Rev, I'd have to roll the treeview itself, then populate it with the entire directory structure of the drive. The file side of it shouldn't be too much work though. I'd really like to do this in Rev for the cross platform aspect of it. I've never really been keen on the file manager setup with OS X either.. They call it finder, but it's also a pain to *Find* things really.

(I couldn't find a decent replacement file manager to use on Vista. The Vista file explorer is a complete nightmare. So as they say, if you want something done right, do it yourself)

In my mind, the best file manager setup was that of the old winfile.exe with windows 3.x and the file managers that came with Windows 95 on up to XP were not too bad. But with each new version of Windows, they kept adding more features which I believe detracted from the speed and usefulness of it. The file explorer with Vista is just an abomination of a file manager, which I truly believe is possessed by some sort of AI demon, because it literally acts on it's own accord. One day it allows you to use detailed view, but later you visit the same folder and it gives you columns for multimedia information and has taken away the file info columns, even though there's not a single file in there that could even be mistaken for a media file, not even an icon or bitmap. The next day, visit the same folder and you now have large icon view.... It just continues to do as it feels like without you ever having to go near the button for changing views.

It also seems the file managers in most of the window managers for Linux are starting to go stray and trying to become like either Finder for Mac, or File Explorer for XP or Vista. And all the home brew file managers are either poorly made or far too simplistic and restrictive, or are horrible abominations that are trying to be 500 apps wrapped up in 1 app.

Ok, well, you get the idea... I'm not happy in the file manager arena right now

~Garrett

dartes · Post by **dartes** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 9:28 am

FourthWorld wrote:Garret, I checked out the links in your sig, and it seems that you and Bernard share my interest in Rebol...I daydream about making RebolView in Rev...

hi Bernard, hi Richard
I know, this is a very old post but I just found it know.

So it looks we are sharing the same love - or should I call it: the same quest? - yes the holy quest for the perfect and most beautiful language... And I do not even properly know what a laguage is (I have not the faintest idea on how you create a language)!

Yes, Rebol is a very fascinating language indeed. I also find Ruby to be a very elegant language. Sorry I'm just expressing very superficial feelings.

Shouldn't we try to start a group of people trying to create the perfect language? Is it too crazy an idea?

FourthWorld · Post by **FourthWorld** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 3:57 pm

dartes wrote:Shouldn't we try to start a group of people trying to create the perfect language? Is it too crazy an idea?

I don't have the compiler experience or time to take on something that large, but I would be interested to see if we might craft a script library to bring some useful functionality of Rebol to Rev.

If such a smaller scope would be of interest to you post some Rebol functions you wish were in Rev and let's see what we can come up with.