wunder wrote:Your product looks very interesting, but to be honest the case study applications do not appear to be significant commercial applications.
"Significant" can be difficult to define. And it seems the Case Study pages represent only a slender portion of the commercial apps made with LiveCode. You won't find Photoshop or Firefox among the apps made with any high-level RAD tool, but you will find many hundreds of vertical-market apps for which such dev tools are a good fit.
When your audience is in the tens of millions, using C++ is a cost-effective way to achieve high performance with reasonable ROI, but when your audience is in the tens of thousands such low-level languages can be cost-prohibitive, opening the door for tools like LiveCode.
For the apps I've produced over the years, the longer dev cycle with C++ would have made those ventures non-starters, but using LiveCode we have solid profitability for nearly every app we've launched - not to mention many thousands of happy users along the way who are delighted to find their specific niche needs addressed with solid multi-platform implementations which support transfer of data between them easily (I'll never understand why a company as well-funded as Intuit can't make a version of their flagship app that lets you use the same data file on both platforms).
That said, because you're coming from a VB background you may also want to take a look at RealBASIC. Personally I've found LiveCode's higher-level zero-compile-time workflow to deliver a higher ROI than anything else out there, but if you have a lot of investment in VB code you may find some of that more easily ported to another BASIC-like implementation, so RB may be worth evaluating for your shop.
When evaluating LiveCode, be prepared for a VERY different way of working. IMNSHO the unusual workflow of LiveCode relative to more traditional languages offers an equally unusual level of productivity, but if coming from a VB background it'll take some getting used to at first so don't be surprised if your first experiments with LiveCode leave you scratching your head. It's a very different beast, but after a few weeks those differences pay off handsomely.
Fortunately you've already taken the first step toward making the best use of LiveCode: you found these forums. There are a lot of folks here who've used VB who can help you get oriented, so please feel free to post any question you may have while you're evaluating LiveCode.
Here's a tip for getting started with LiveCode: sometimes you'll find that the answer to a problem seems incredibly simple, almost too simple to be trusted. That's normal, it's just how much of the language is designed. LiveCode reads like other people's pseudo-code, with expressions like "put item 2 of line 1 of field 1 into SomeVar", and such simplicity can be difficult to wrap your head around when you're coming from another language. Not all of the breadth of the language is so easily readable, and folks have very different coding styles (I'm partial to Hungarian notation myself), but just keep in mind as you go that one of the biggest hurdles I see people encounter with learning LiveCode is when they say, "Really? That's it? I wouldn't have guessed it would be so much like English."
This page at the RunRev site offers some tips for moving to LiveCode from Java and C++, and some of what it covers may help orient your transition from VB:
LiveCode for C, C++ and Java Developers
http://www.runrev.com/developers/lesson ... -and-java/
I've also found Osterhout's seminal paper on the value of scripting languages helpful for appreciating the differences between languages like LiveCode relative to lower-level typed languages (his comments on TCL apply almost across the board to LiveCode here):
Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century
http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html
And lastly, a UI tip: VB and many other IDEs present their UI in a single window, building your own windows and layouts within a pane as a sort of proxy. But with LiveCode, it's truly "live code", you're building actual windows with controls that can be used as you lay them out. To support this workflow, the tools in the LiveCode IDE are separate windows which more or less surround your app, but are not physically attached to your app's window. I've known some VB devs who find this off-putting at first, as it does mean a little more window management as you move things around. But the payoff for this design is that your app's windows are living, breathing things at the moment you create them, and you can run their scripts while in the IDE without ever waiting for a compiler. Hopefully this perspective will help you appreciate the most visible difference between LiveCode and VB.
Best of luck with your explorations. I look forward to seeing more of your posts here.
