4.0: Your Moment in the Sun
RunRev releases version 4.0, bringing the Revolution to the Web

by Kevin Miller

This is it. After months of dedicated, hard work from the team, and immense amounts of highly valuable input from you our wider community, Rev 4.0 is finally here. I'd just like to say thank you to everyone for helping us make this happen.

Rev 4.0 is not just another new version. It is probably the most significant release of Rev to date, and brings the power of understandable, user friendly scripting to the widest audience yet. We've always supported the major desktop platforms of Mac, Windows and Linux, now we are extending that to the Web and server environment. Take your favorite project, and compile it for Web with just a couple of clicks.

It's our most significant release ever because you will be putting Rev-authored content in front of millions of people through the most ubiquitous distribution channel ever created, the World Wide Web. You no longer need to have your users download and install large executables.

Second, we're making our revMedia edition completely free, enabling students and anyone who wants to learn our easy programming language to create amazing results with little or no investment. We expect the combination of these two initiatives to increase the number of revTalk "speakers" by orders of magnitude.

We're no longer a "best kept secret." Now is the time to tell your friends about Rev, and to publish your amazing work online.

So what exactly is in 4.0?

Publish to the Web
Now present your solutions online within major browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Build fully-featured, multi-window solutions that interact with Web pages, the local file system, and external data sources. Automatically adopt the target operating system look-and-feel, or design your own dynamic interface. Compile to tiny, compressed redistributable files with the full functionality of a desktop application, but without the need for users to download and install a standalone executable. Develop anything from simple banners, animations, and multimedia presentations to immersive games, sophisticated dashboards, and multiuser productivity applications.

Dynamic Effects
Accelerate and simplify the construction of compelling user interfaces by programmatically specifying visual effects for any object at runtime. Apply drop shadows, inner shadows, outer and inner glows, and color overlays with a variety of customizable settings. Give your solutions a rich sense of visual depth and dynamism without the need to render effects in an external graphics program.

Learning and Reference
Enjoy a faster, cleaner, more reliable dictionary with additional information about the revTalk keywords you use most. Access new resources online including a Web-based revTalk dictionary and the all-new, task-based “Lessons” knowledge base. Show off your work to the world via revOnline, now also accessible via the Web.

Usability
New auto-update notifications in all editions of Rev automatically inform you after launch of available new versions, so you’re sure to receive new features and fixes as soon as they are available. This version also sports dozens of fixes and enhancements to the data grid and other areas, plus new desktop icons and artwork.

New Externals Interface
A reworked externals interface, one of the under-the-hood enhancements in Rev 4.0, enables developers to extend the Rev feature set with higher performance and tighter integration. Externals can now exchange binary data with Rev, access multi-dimensional arrays, and work directly with data in memory, eliminating the speed and performance hits associated with copying data between Rev and the externals that existed in the past. These enhancements greatly expand the possibilities for using Rev to interact with deep system functions, hardware, and 3D APIs, just for starters.

I'm really excited to be bringing you this game-changing release, and look forward to seeing a whole raft of new Rev applications made using it. If you ask me whether Rev can make programming for the Web as powerful and accessible as it already has on the desktop, my answer would be that together with you, the Rev community, it will.

About the Author Kevin Miller is the CEO of RunRev Ltd. and a Rev user.