RevMedia

Katherine W. Cochrane Nashville, TN 20-24 April, 1991$!PRE!$ A few weeks ago, just before going to the RTI conference, I made a rash promise to write a trip report when it was all over. Someday I'll learn, maybe. Anyway, here are my impressions. But first I should make clear that I am a novice Advanced Revelation (ARev) user/developer. ARev is a DBMS for PCs, and has a justly earned reputation for being hard to learn, but very powerful and flexible. Why I chose to use ARev for developing my applications is another story, and can be found in the Consult forum's library. (A COMPUSERVE forum - Ed). The conference happened to come at both a time and a place convenient to me, and I knew I had a lot to learn, so one Sunday I drove up to the Opryland Hotel in Nashville to see what it was all about. The first "event" was registration, which was very smoothly handled by the staff of that surprisingly sophisticated and elegant hotel. Part of the registration packet from RTI was a HUGE notebook containing copies of the presentation slides from all the sessions, which I found very handy. On the remaining three days of the conference I merely extracted the pages for the sessions I was going to attend and avoided carrying the whole big bundle, but I still have available the materials from the sessions I missed. Since there was more than one time when I wanted to be in two places at once, this saved my sanity to some extent. As for the sessions themselves, the first full day saw some of the best and some of the worst. One speaker in particular was so superficial that I scratched off any other sessions he was giving from my list of things to see. However, the following session was filled with such useful detail that it more than made up for the first experience. Such unevenness is probably not a surprise, but RTI should work on letting their people know better what is expected of them so next year we don't have the same experience. What were the sessions about? This conference was split roughly down the middle between users and managers of users of HR-1 (an application RTI has built on ARev that is used for Human Resources databases) and ARev developer s. There were five tracks planned, with some overlapping. One of them, the Hands-On Workshop, was apparently dropped due to some last minute glitch according to a rumour I heard. The other four were Developer B (beginners), Developer A (experienced), VAR Channel (which overlapped Developer A), Client- Server, and Human Resources. My own conflicts came when I wanted to attend both Developer A/VAR Channel and Client-Server sessions. I wound up attending some of each, and gained a lot of knowledge, but it would have been better from my stand-point to have not had topics that are of such concern for developers, such as Client- Server technology, at the same time as some of the more cogent technical sessions for the developer track. This is especially obvious since one of the company officers pointed out in a general session that approximately 70% of ARev's client base is networked, generally in LANs. There were a number of announcements made during the course of the conference. One was that ARev will be available in a Windows 3.0 version by the end of the year. Another was that versions to run under UNIX and one for OS/2 are in the works, and even a Macintosh version. And, of interest to readers here, the new CompuServe Revelation forum was formally announced (type GO REVELATION). Probably the most important announcement, however, was the explanation of the new Revelation Programmable Module (RPM) Architecture. The RPM is an open architecture that can be envisioned as a series of layers: RTI has great plans for accessibility using the new architecture, even more than is now available through Environmental Bonding. On the subject of bonding, I should not neglect to mention yet another announcement, this one of an Environmental Bonding Toolkit. With this package developers will be able to create their own Environmental Bonds to whatever data source they need to access. A warning was issued with the announcement, that it is not a trivial task, even with the toolkit, and requires strong C language skills and about 6 man- months to develop a bond. However, it does present the prospect of more and more third-party Bonds becoming available. The expected release date for the Toolkit is 3rd quarter 1991. The other topic that most interested me was Client- Server utility, especially using ARev with Microsoft/Sybase's SQL Server. This is an "intelligent" database server, intended to run on a fast dedicated server, such as a 486 machine, that processes the queries from "client" machines on a LAN and retrieves data from a back-end database, such as Oracle or even ARev on a centrally- located machine. The difference between an intelligent server and an ordinary one is that the intelligent server has the ability to not only route queries, but to tell the back-end database exactly which rows and columns to return, not an entire file. This saves a tremendous amount of traffic on the LAN, and can speed operations by two orders of magnitude, according to the MicroSoft rep, Gary Voth. Oh, yes, and ARev was the first product on the market to announce compatibility with SQL Server. All this technical stuff was very interesting, but how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Well, RTI not only put on a very informative and worthwhile conference, they know how to throw a party, as well. This was probably the friendliest conference I've ever attended. Maybe this is because it was the "1st Annual" and there weren't too many people who knew one another before arriving, so they were more open to meeting and talking to others. Or maybe it was the general atmosphere of openness and cordiality that was put forth by the RTI folks themselves. Maybe both. Whatever, it was certainly enjoyable from a social perspective. Since so many of us there are entrepreneurs and consultants, it gave us an excellent opportunity to make new contacts and build our own "bonds." All in all, a great conference, and if you are an ARev developer, you owe it to yourself to come to the "2nd Annual" event next April in Dallas, at Lowe's Anatole Hotel. See you there! Katherine Cochrane's company, DKS Consulting can be contacted at 4800 Whitesburg Drive, Suite 29. Huntsville, AL 35802 - 205 881 4182 (Voice) 205 882 2917 (Fax), Compuserve 71216,1271, Email kwc@well.sf.ca.u