Transcript is the dynamic programming language used in Revolution, a commercially marketed cross-platform rapid application development environment created by Runtime Revolution Ltd.
Revolution runs on Macintosh 7,8,9, Macintosh OS X, Windows 95 through XP, and several flavors of Unix. Revolution's language, Transcript, is dynamically typed, English-like, and provides features including associative arrays, regular expressions, QuickTime support, database access, and TCP/IP connectivity. It is claimed to allow beginning programmers to get started easily. For seasoned programmers steeped in "conventional' languages, the learning curve is much steeper as many former means of "doing things" must be abandonded.
Revolution project files can be used on any platform, and run with the platform's look and feel and behavior requiring little modification. Menus are handled correctly for each platform.
Compiling produces a single-file standalone executable for each platform targeted. There is no separate runtime necessary.
Revolution offers high-level access to many commonly used features. For example, to load the contents of a web page into a variable takes one line of code:
put url "http://www.yahoo.com" into tMyVariable
FTP and file access is similar:
put url "ftp://john:passwd@ftp.example.net:2121/picture.jpg" into url "binfile:myFile.txt"
Versions
Revolution has three versions:
- Express is designed for use and deployment on one platform only
- Developer is designed for use on one platform and deployment on any
- Enterprise can be used on any platform and deploys to any as well