I don't know, but I'm happy to make guesses - especially when it gives
me a chance to rant a bit as well :-)
Runrev had a first attempt at tackling "the web" with revlets - which
worked well, but stumbled and failed because by then it was becoming
impossible to get anyone to install a player.
So they had to try a different approach, and LCServer was the right
answer (IMO). (Of course the HTML5 project is an even more right answer,
but this pre-dated HTML/CSS having enough capabilities to think about that).
The problem was, in those days before Open Source and Community Version,
it was going to be a hard sell to get people to try LC as a server
scripting language. Of coure, it was an easy sell into the existing user
base - but that wasn't big enough, hey had to extend their user base.
Fortunately, they had some advantages of being able to invent language
features without any legacy hold-ups. But even more than that, they had
one "killer feature" - live, remote debugging of server scripts. What
software developer wouldn't want that - server scripting but using the
tools of today (IDE/intelligent debugger) rather than relying on
debugging/logging code (like it was the 1980s again - which AFAIK it is
for all other scripting languages).
Unfortunately (as I understand it), enabling the debugging involves
significant modificaitons to a standard Apache installation - so not
something that a casual "let's give it a try" user would be able to, or
even be interested to, handle for themselves. Hence, a bundled web
hosting package which allowed Runrev to set everything up, and to try
out the features, in a controlled environment.
So - IMHO - providing a web hosting offering was a good idea.
And, IMHO, it was a failure, due to inadequate resources and development
for the on-rev client.
It lacked many basic features that could, and should, have been there to
make it really feel like a modern IDE-style environment. I could rant
for hours about it :-), but I'll restrain myself. It was inadequately
specced, and then on top of that it was slow, buggy and unsupported.
(And of course, it should never have been an 'on-rev client', it should
have been a "remote LCServer IDE" which provided editing with full
colouring, etc. plus file/directory mirroring with rsync and/or ftp
upload and pluggable editors (to allow open source editors for other
languages - and it should hve done all that for any LC Server, and
allowec debugging for any hosting service that allowed it - i.e. on-rev
initially, and others if demand required it.
So anyway, the opportunities that came from providing their own web
hosting service were never realized.
Whether or not it is profitable as it is, I have no idea. But I know it
could have been much more than it is/was.
Alex.
On 04/07/2015 23:38, Peter Haworth wrote:
I don't think I've been involved with Livecode long enough to know the
answer to this but why did Livecode get into the web hosting business? I
hope it's profitable for them because it seems to cause them a lot of
problems.
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 2:22 PM Dave Kilroy <d...@applicationinsight.com>
wrote:
livecode.com has been a bit of a yo-yo for the last day or so - up, down,
up,
down, up - and currently, down
Dave
-----
"The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits." -
Albert Einstein
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