My group started using HyperCard as a videodisc driver in 1987. One thing led to another, and our efforts moved from focusing on videodiscs to focusing on Hypercard. When Netscape came out, we had over 100 useful Hypercard stacks. Many of the stacks we had were migrated from Hypercard to a Web-based cgi system with Hypercard as a back end. The RevCon Malta talk will spend some time on this evolution, but will deal mostly with the strategies we are using today.

I first learned of RunRev at a January MacWorld. I bought Shafer's book, read it overnight, and came back to sign up for a "workshop" at which I learned a great deal. Shafer gave a talk on hypermedia software, and essentially everything he said rang true with my experiences. Jacque Gay gave a talk on cgi that got me thinking. I went back to Lincoln with a one-for-one HC to RunRev migration path in mind. Because of issues with AppleEvents, my success at that endeavor was a bit long in coming.

I attended RevCon West in 2005, and that's where my thinking changed. Because the amount of material to migrate was enormous, the choice of a path was key. Clearly, one route would be something like php/MySQL for much of what I was doing. A presentation by Jerry Daniels gave me the idea of using xml (xml-like) text files. Data formerly stored in RunRev fields would be written to these files. This required a massive rethinking with many more challenges than when making a one-for-one conversion.

By RevCon West 2006 things were very well underway. Most of our strategies were in place; several projects had been migrated. My students have figured out ways to move data back and forth between xml-files and MySQL. We've knocked out one Web appliance; several projects are under way or on the drawing board. These days I'm in the process of moving Web courses in chemistry pedagogy for high school teachers; half still run on Hypercard under Mac OS 9, but the rest are under RunRev cgi under Mac OS X.

There is something very important to keep in mind. I'm a teacher. I use technology to support learning directly to students or indirectly to other teachers. The technology choices I make may not be the latest and greatest, but they work. (My principal server does about 15 gigs of traffic per month; it has over 100K of 'hits' on mid-week days.) A small part of my talk will deal with how the RunRev community of programmers markets. It was really nice to see the RunRev education package offered for college students -- where the unit of merit usually is the course and the time span is the semester or quarter.

I'm looking forward to Malta. Thus far the RevCons have been wonderful for me. I meet people who are extremely knowledgeable and who love their work. One after another, I see clever ways that people have chosen to tackle problems. Perhaps most important, I experience how remarkably powerful yet friendly Runtime Revolution is as a development tool.