Holy moley! First test of Revolution versus Metacard

[J. Landman Gay]

Shari wrote:

> The stack opens.  But the Revolution IDE does not like that I have 
> standard stacks installed in the stack.  (For ease of Standalone 
> building, a long time ago I installed custom versions of Ask, Answer, 
> Message etc. in the stack so that I would not have to import them every 
> time I built a standalone.)  The Message box in particular gives it 
> fits.

Actually, MetaCard has exactly the same problem, but it doesn't put up 
any warning about it. It is generally a bad idea to embed the message 
box or other IDE stacks, because you can't have two stacks open with the 
same name. The engine gets really, really confused when you do that. Rev 
tries to protect you from that.

MetaCard ignores the fact that you have two message boxes open (and 
earlier versions of Rev did too,) but if you edit one of them, it can 
easily be the wrong one. The engine doesn't distinguish between the two 
and will operate on whichever one it happens to notice first. Unless you 
supply a full path to the stack every time you edit, you can't be sure 
the right one has focus.

Rev warns you ahead of time, but you can cancel the warning and continue 
if you want.

   I could not determine whether my password protections were still
> in place.  (The Message Box errors seemed to override most of what I 
> tried to experiment with.)

You can type in the message box:

   the password of this stack

and you'll see the encoding. But in Rev, it is a better idea not to 
manually assign passwords for stacks you plan to release as standalones. 
The standalone builder can assign the password when it builds, leaving 
your stack free and clear during development. The standalone builder 
also adds the message box, ask/answer dialogs, and many other libraries 
and files if you say you want them. You can also tell it to copy over 
external files or stacks of your choosing; they will appear in the 
application's folder as separate files, ready to ship.

Another feature I've really come to appreciate is the built-in error 
reporting for standalones. That last pane allows you to put in your 
email address, and if a user gets an error, a dialog will appear with a 
description of the engine error and a place for them to add comments, 
and any boilerplate you want to add. When they click "Send" it opens up 
their email client and lets them send you the error report. The neat 
thing about this is that if you include it during development builds, 
you can read the error in your own email client. It's a handy way to 
debug standalones.

I like that my stacks remain clear of debris at all times, while all the 
files and features I want still get put into the build.

> 
> Overall it was rather confusing, not having a clue how to approach 
> things that are second nature to me.  There were so many standalone 
> options, and I could not tell if it recognized any of my presettings,

Basically, you have to set things up once. After that, the settings 
dialog will remember and you can check on the feature's status there. 
The standalone settings dialog uses a few custom properties in your 
stack to store your choices. It doesn't read the stack on the fly; 
you'll have to tell it the first time so it knows.

  it
> was very confusing.  I assumed that once familiar with it, standalones 
> would be easier to build as there appeared to be more presettings that 
> could be set.

Yes. That's why I like it.

> 
> But at this time, too much confusion, so I opened the happy stack in the 
> newly created Metacard 2.7 IDE.
> 
> Familiarity returned.  No weird errors regarding things I have 
> pre-installed.

There are only a few stacks that cause the warning. The ask/answer 
dialogs and the message box are the only ones I can think of offhand. 
The easiest way to deal with it is to remove those stacks from your 
mainstack in MetaCard, using the Components pane in the stack info 
dialog. Then bring the stack over to Rev and it will open as easily as 
it does in MC now. If you want to remove them in the Rev IDE instead, 
you'll have to type. Make sure you enter the long name of the stack when 
you do the delete:

   delete stack "message box" of stack "myStack"

or else the engine may delete the IDE message box.

> 
> I really was looking forward to working in Revolution itself.  But at 
> least for existing, finished projects, it's a good thing I can work in 
> the familiar IDE.

I made the move slowly. There's a lot in there, and some of it is really 
handy. Pick one component at a time and play with it. For example, play 
with the message box for a day. Besides the standard 1-line box, you can 
have multiple lines. I very much like the message box lists of pending 
messages, frontscripts, backscripts, and the easy way you can access 
them for editing. I always forget it's there, but I think the lists of 
current global properties could be pretty handy too.

Another problem for me in MC is knowing at a glance which stack is 
currently the default. Rev puts that up for display in the message box, 
so you always know which stack will be the target.

> Perhaps I can try working on my new project in Revolution, and work on 
> existing projects in Metacard.  The new project should be in the early 
> enough stages not to send it into spasms.

That would be a good way to ease in. Though there aren't really any 
spasms involved; you just happened to hit a warning that MC should 
probably have too. Next time you can dismiss it if you want, the engine 
behavior will be the same; i.e., iffy.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com