Rev and the Internet

[deeverd]

Hello Mark,

P.S. Seeing WebMerge reminded me of another excellent Revolution-made program I've been planning to buy for awhile.

Just a moment ago, I downloaded your Zipfer program and paid for a Windows license.

Looking very forward to using it!

Also, I was wondering about your screen capture program and if it is Windows compatible, and how it compares to the Blue Mango program that seems to be getting a lot of press?

I'm assuming it's Ok to be asking about it in the Internet forum, since I would think it makes a great tool for creating tutorials on a website.

All the best, deeverd

[BvG]

Now, to answer some of the questions asked of me:

Yes, I will definitely need a secure environment, and yes, there is incentive for people to want to hack into it, since my program will most likely receive a lot of traffic from working writers and would-be (future) writers around the world who want and need instant feedback on their manuscripts by my automated program.

That is not an incentive to hack, that's an incentive to use. People hack stuff because the site is related to programming, or to make money, or because it's incredible easy to hack (normally insecure/outdated 3rd party stuff like forums). I doubt your planned project meets any of these criteria, judging from your description.

Since many of these users will most likely not have registered their copyrights officially, I certainly want to make sure that hackers cannot steal or compromise their manuscripts while using my program.

Again, this has not much to do with each other. Hackers don't want some story, they want sellable information, or just hack because you're hackable. Also, registering copyright is not necessary, copyright is always there in regards to textual works.

I'm assuming that I'll need a homepage, since I'll need to get a domain name with a specific and memorable address.

You can have a domain without an html site, and you can have a domain or server without any html on it.

I can't really run my applications on the client side, because the software wouldn't be protected, and if I sold the software on CD's, I'd have to charge the users a reasonable sum of money, which might prevent some deserving people from having access to it.

Most smaller software is just sent to users via the network. You got Revolution that way, didn't you? Your program can be the same. Also note that the program can access stuff on the internet, so there's no need to ship data with it. On the other hand, you seem to be quite sure that you need a html page, so maybe you have other reasons to do it that way?

Bandwidth might be a problem, too, since some manuscripts could easily be a million characters in length, and once writing clubs, agents, submissions editors from publishing houses, students, journalists and working book authors are aware of this web resource and start using it, my site could be using up a lot of space.

One million Characters equals a megabyte (MB). That is not very much, unless every minute someone uploads that. Storage on webspace these days is normally in the hundreds of gigabytes, so you can store hundred-thousands of these large files. Keep in mind that bandwidth is more of a throughput issue, not of absolute size. So the amount of Bytes per second is interesting, not the total amount of data.

I'm not exactly sure which of those tools I need yet because, I'm almost ashamed to admit it, I have no idea of what the difference is between static pages and dynamically-generated pages, although I will be very quick in researching the difference. Is there a good reason to use both or should a person choose one or the other?

A static html page is stored on the server, and does not change when users visit the url to that specific document. A dynamic page is assembled every time someone visits the site.
For example, most of the pages in this forum are dynamic, because they put together from a style template, the stuff at the top of each page (for example the "what kind will you start" picture), the forum entries are collected from a database, and then there's the stuff on the bottom of each page.
Although more complex, the dynamic approach gives you increased flexibility, as well as reusable stuff. Imagine you have 30 static pages, and they all have an email link. Now if you want to change the email, you need to go to each page, and change it there, which is very tedious. But if you did insert the email dynamically, you only have to change it in one place.

Frankly, to me it seems that you do not know enough for creating a big project. Why don't you make a very small example project, and try stuff out there? Then you'll learn what works, and where problems are, enabling you to plan bigger projects correctly.
If you need that writers text-upload service immediately, and have no time to experiment, I suggest to pay someone with experience to program it according to your specifications.

[Mark]

Hello Mark,

P.S. Seeing WebMerge reminded me of another excellent Revolution-made program I've been planning to buy for awhile.

Just a moment ago, I downloaded your Zipfer program and paid for a Windows license.

Looking very forward to using it!

Also, I was wondering about your screen capture program and if it is Windows compatible, and how it compares to the Blue Mango program that seems to be getting a lot of press?

I'm assuming it's Ok to be asking about it in the Internet forum, since I would think it makes a great tool for creating tutorials on a website.

All the best, deeverd

Hi Deeverd,

Thanks for buying Zipfer. Don't forget to contact me if you have any feature requests or other comments. Feature requests and bug reports are the ONLY way for this programme to evolve!

I think you are asking me how Snapper compres to ScreenSteps. Snapper is just a simple application that lets you create a screencast of (a part of) your screen. It concentrates on movies themselves and nothing more. Also, it is a bit cheaper. Also, the direction we are heading for with further development is different, as you will find out in the future. Currently, Snapper is not compatible with windows, but we are working on that.

As always, if you have questions about any of our products, please contact Economy-x-Talk support. (I don't want to be banned because of advertising myself ;-) ).

Best,

Mark

[deeverd]

Hello BvG,

I do appreciate your honesty and frankness. You're half right about the big project. The programming portion of my project (other than the internet part) really took the effort of a writer/writing researcher more than a computer programmar, so I was very qualified for that portion. I've known for many years what I needed a computer program to do with the databases and research I assembled in order to create this program. Only recently, however, have I gained the expertise to make it a reality as a computer program. So that part of the big project is no problem. Only the internet aspect will be somewhat of a challenge in the near future.

To accomplish that end, I have enrolled in two university classes at night that have to do with web building and the design of educational software (layout of web pages and theory of how to do it so that users gain the most out of it.) Your insights, and everyone else who have contributed to this thread, have also given me an excellent head-start, as well as the suggestions I have received from everyone regarding some of the tools of the web building trade, so I just wanted to say thanks... and now it's time for me to get to work on learning HTML, PHP, SQL, pedagogical agents and a host of other challenges that loom ahead for me in the near future.

Until I have some small specific questions that I am unable to find satisfactory answers to, I'll roll up my sleeves and put my nose to the grindstone. In the meantime, cheers from deeverd