Web publishing software
WebMerge
"We've delivered feature requests in just a few hours after hanging up the phone with the customer; if we were using Java we would have still been defining our classes."
WebMerge generates static web pages from database and spreadsheet content, using templates that can be written in any HTML editor. This allows easy publication on the Web without the expense or complication of a live database hosting solution.
Revolution's rapid development cycle, attractive GUI capabilities, and rich, efficient text processing made it a natural choice for this product. Reviewers and customers regularly compliment WebMerge's execution speed, critical in an application used for generating tens of thousands of Web pages at a time. At least one reviewer has mistaken it for having been written in C, but the truth is there's no way we could have afforded to build such a vertical product and still get the sort of solid, fast performance on three platforms if we worked with a lower-level language.
With less time coding we spend more time talking to customers, finding out exactly how they work, and what they need to work more efficiently. Everything in the dozen free upgrades we've delivered has been driven by these extensive customer interviews, leading to reviews like MacWorld magazine calling WebMerge "remarkable easy to use."
With the cost savings in development time we've also been able to provide a level of technical support our customers tell us they're unusually happy with. In some cases we've delivered feature requests in just a few hours after hanging up the phone with the customer; if we were using Java we would have still been defining our classes.
The simplicity of Revolution's messaging and object model have allowed us to do things which would have been cost-prohibitive in lower-level languages. For example, with the latest version of WebMerge we introduced a new plugin system which allows other developers to add new tools to the program, and allows us to add new capabilities easily between major releases. Revolution's native object model takes care of the messaging and data structures needed to allow this type of interaction between plugins and the program. All we had to do was add a menu to open the plugins and a few lines of code. Our extensibility system was done in under two hours.
One of our customers recently wrote "the tech support and upgrade policy surpasses products we had paid far more money for". We get email like that every week, and have posted some of it on our Gallery page. A lot of the way we do things is made possible by choosing Revolution, a development system that lets us focus on the people side of our business.
About Richard Gaskin and Fourth World Media Corporation
Richard Gaskin is ambassador of Fourth World Media Corporation, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specializing in multi-platform software development and training. With 15 years' experience, Richard has delivered dozens of applications for small businesses and Fortune 500 companies on Mac OS, Windows, UNIX, and the World Wide Web.