Benefits of Mirye Runtime Revolution Issue Format

The new release format offers the following benefits:

• Additional, Permanent Benefits. These are benefits that customers receive regardless of when they are announced. With this first issue, Studio and Enterprise customers receive Valentina for Revolution 3.1 ADK Advanced, the ultra fast database toolkit for Revolution.
• Limited, Timed Benefits. These benefits are only available if you download them within the limited time. With this first issue, Media, Studio and Enterprise customers receive the Business as Unusual Volume 1 collection of 20 royalty free soundtracks.
• News and Articles. With each release, there will be news, articles and tips offered to help enhance your use of Revolution.
• Special Offers. You can get special member offers for other, or third party products that will enhance your use of Revolution.

The Why Behind Mirye Runtime Revolution Format Change

Mirye Runtime Revolution is a professional tool for creating and deploying cross platform applications on all major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In many respects, it overlaps and competes with the likes of Adobe Director, REAL Software REALbasic, MS Visual Basic, Java and even Adobe Flash or Microsoft’s .net framework.

Mirye Runtime Revolution overlaps with REALbasic, Java and .net framework in that it can deploy to multiple operating systems using mostly the same code base. But that simply describes features in the last step of a work flow pipeline – not the entire pipeline of a release.

Designers that have experience with Adobe Director, Flash or Microsoft’s new Expression more likely to recognize the pipeline, because these products also excel in aggregating combinations of audio, video and graphics assets. These are elements that are usually developed by someone else and upstream in the workflow pipeline.

Teams though can share more than just assets – but the knowledge of how to best exploit the use of those assets at each point in the work flow.

This brings us back to the format change and the question: Is Mirye Runtime Revolution only a deployment technology, or does it encompass the aggregated assets and knowledge? Even if you are a weekend developer and you wear all the hats of artist, layout designer, sound technician and coder, an additional benefit at any point in your work flow pipeline provides benefits to the entire project.

This brings us back to our new issues format. By providing ongoing knowledge and benefits in an magazine-like issue format – expanded beyond a software only update – a release can deliver benefits that are more timely, and benefit your entire work flow.

The morning begins at 9:30 AM with groups splitting between an Organizing Your Code II session run by Ken Ray of Sons of Thunder Software and a Files and Documents session. I sat in Ken Ray’s session, where he reviewed a variety of products such as The Scripter’s Scrapbook for organizing your code for easy reuse. This product supports 17 different languages, including Revolution, and has a feature that lets you search various vendor mailing lists for terms.

Ken followed this up with a discussion on how arrays work in Revolution. He discussed how he has his own notation for differentiating between arrays based on their scope. Later, Ken compared how arrays work in Revolution compared with other languages.

Then, he covered how custom properties work. Revolution internally uses a “c” to denote custom properties. He cautioned that “is among the keys” for poling for custom keys or properties doesn’t apply to customKeys. He then demonstrated how you can store anything in a custom property, including additional stacks. Finally, he discussed how you can trap a getProp message and have your stack modify it.

10:40 AM

Phil Davis presents Working with USB Devices and Revolution. Phil has extensive background in connecting custom USB devices to educational titles. Phil first describes just how complicated the USB spec is, and in this presentation discusses storage and communication. There are four different transfer modes supported for transferring information. Fortunately, Phil describes that you do not need to know the specs to work with USB and Revolution.

You can poll for Vendor ID, Product Name, Product ID and Serial Number to control use of your stack. This information is available on every OS, but every OS manages it differently. He went on to show how Windows stores this information in the registry, and how to query the registry from Revolution. On Mac OS X, there is a system utility to retrieve information about USB devices that’s accessible through a command line. Phil has created a library to work with USB devices that is freely available on his website. He also briefly covered USB Communications Class device, showing a USB RCS Servo Controller for working with USB cameras and other robotic devices.

Ill be updating throughout the day.

Kevin Miller, president of Runtime Revolution spoke at the keynote, reviewing the significant success of the Revolution 2.9 release, including new improvements in printing, drag and drop and the new Linux architecture.

This was followed by some developer presentations by Quartam Reports and Daniels & Mara GLX 2.0 with Visual Application Browser.

Revolution will gain a PHP-style engine and plugin allowing you to embed Revolution code in a web page. A prototype was demonstrated by Robert Cailliau, co-creator of the world wide web. It will be compatible with all major web browsers. It will require little redevelopment of projects to bring them to the web.

• Performance is very fast – much faster than a Java applet
• This will have a sandbox security system similar to Java
• It will support database access
• It will support a plug in architecture if the end user will allow trust for it (including Applescript, shell, VB Script, etc)

A few demonstrations were shown.

Updated 12:15 AM

Trevor Devore, developer of Screensteps visual documentation tool presents the GLX Application Framework, a fast application starter framework for Revolution. You can download the documentation for the GLX Application Framework. Two very impressive features are file management, handling preferences, managing recently opened files and application packaging. You can download the framework and try it yourself.

Updated 3:05 PM

Scott Rossi of Tactile Media presents Multimedia I. His preferred graphics format for working with Revolution is the PNG format as it supports multiple levels of transparency, and the benefits of importing vs referencing graphics files. He followed this with a discussion of comparison of object effects vs card effects, and combining these with audio playback. He also demonstrated how to layer players to achieve multiple, simultaneous audio playback with Revolution.

Scott then demonstrated scripted music notation with Shakobox.

4:32 PM

Jerry Daniels of Daniels Mara gave an introductory presentation on building Internet applications. Jerry demonstrated how to create handlers and use the message path to access files on the internet to update local applications. Next, Jerry covered building a multi-tier architecture using tagged data. He recommended using tagged data for building application preferences, saving them in text files or using custom properties.

Jerry later moved on to how to extract data from the Basecamp API. You can also get example code from the GLX website. Lastly, Jerry demonstrated integrating browser-based data displayed through the web browser object from a website into an Revolution project using drag-drop.

5:44 PM

Devin Asay presented on building courseware and product demos using Revolution.

But this really isn’t about the technology – its about the socializing and appropriate venue. It seems like that simple truth may be eluding many, who probably have already forgotten what drew them to pre-Web 2.0 venues that very much were about where you hung out. The more you can get your face out there in the right venue, the more likely you will meet others of that also like that venue.

MySQL has become a formidable competitor to other relational database management systems from companies such as Oracle and IBM. The database itself is free for people to download, and MySQL makes money by offering subscription support packages.

Sun has, over the course of the last five years, found itself the guest without a chair at the enterprise dinner table. Solaris OS was the operating system of choice when companies were building their first internet infrastructures, and Sun found new relevance with the Java – only for Java to find cold comfort on the desktop but a welcome home on the server. Open sourcing Java and now, the acquisition of MySQL strengthens the relationship it would like to groom with the now respected open source developer community; the relationship that Oracle’s support (or hijacking as Ive heard it referred to) of Red Hat Linux was supposed to accomplish.

This will matter little to developers who use ultra-fast Valentina database system or cross-platform development environments like Revolution.
Although Valentina competes far more with MySQL with Valentina Developer Network than it does with the many variations of SQLite based solutions on the market today, MySQL is now (or shortly) a Sun product – the hurdles will become one-upping Oracle and IBM. Notice the missing reference to Microsoft SQL Server in the reporting and you’ll easily figure out the commonalities Sun wants to compete against – the infrastructure market around the database – with the buttery goodness of open source to pull you into their total (and expensive) solutions.

Developers do not choose Valentina because there is a massive army of certified engineers or that there is a pre-existing enterprise ecosystem around it. Valentina’s strengths remain the same:

Clean object-relational model – often overlooked, but how you interface with Valentina just makes a lot of sense because it mirrors good general programming practices.

Incredible speed – why developers have always loved Valentina, and why competitors are now trying to boost their claims – our minutes-to-seconds mantra is true if you port from a competitor’s product.

Flexibility – your solution made with Valentina serving the same market as a competitor using Valentina can be entirely different. You have complete, granular control down to details in how data is stored in files.

- and finally, price-value. The cost to scale up to providing enterprise solutions isn’t a mystery and doesn’t require a call from an aggressive direct sales representative.

The Sun acquisition of MySQL won’t make any difference at all. If anything, the aggressiveness of MySQL direct sales representatives will likely lessen, unless the bottom end cost of licensing MySQL is raised to the level of interest of Sun sales reps who are also trying to sell you hardware.