Bob Earp wrote:
> Well, I think you are half correct Richard. These sort of decisions
> need to be made on a case by case basis....
On further consideration I think you're absolutely correct.
I was talking about this with Ken Ray last night, and we hit on a
distinction which may be useful for deciding when to use a converter and
when to rewrite:
If an app has more content than code use a converter, but if more code
than content then rewrite.
Even then there may be exceptions, but the idea is that multimedia
projects usually have a lot of objects which need to be laid out in
specific ways, and that's the sort of thing a converter can do well;
redoing hundreds of card layouts by hand is a waste of time.
But things like productivity apps often have relatively little content,
i.e. fewer objects, but tons of code, and code written in another xTalk
dialect will be of questionable value in terms of robustness,
extensibility, and performance in LiveCode.
While xTalks have many commonalities, they're all very different
products -- if they weren't there would be only one. :) Those
differences lie in object types and syntax options that result in ports
which may have code that makes no sense in the target environment, or at
best uses language conventions that aren't optimized for the target.
Also, many productivity apps attempt to adhere to the UI conventions of
the host platform as much as possible, but if a project is being ported
from an older xTalk to LiveCode chances are it was designed for an
earlier version of the OS and needs revision to look current anyway.
Moreover, most other xTalks are single-platform tools, so they have no
methods for handling UI differences between OSes and will require
revision to account for that.
So code-heavy projects with relatively few objects can be an opportunity
for updating the app not only for the current version of its original
target platform, but for multiple platforms that it never previously had
to take into account.
But for content-heavy apps, I fully agree: it's nothing but RSI to
reproduce hundreds of card layouts by hand.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv
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