Re:MetaCard, anyone? (Score 2)

It gets better...

FIRST: Metacard has an IDE (aka GUI, aka interactive development environment) where you can build complete GUI apps. MC has a set of canned interface objects (buttons, fields, vector & raster graphics, scrollbars, progress bars, platform-specific look-and-feel settings, hierarchical menus, media players, etc). You draw the interface objects on a "card" (form/window/frame/whatever) by dragging them into existence; script them as needed so they each do their little jobs; and pretty soon gestault happens - you have a "stack" (MC app file) that can be moved around from Linux to Win32 to MacOS to Unix to Kingdom Come... (actually I don't think the Kingdom Come version is even in beta yet)... the point is, your creation is binary compatible across all dozen-plus supported platforms. You can write it on your platform of choice, even if your clients/friends/owners want to use it on an inferior platform.

SECOND: Metacard's command/function/property set is *vast*. Anything that can be done in Perl can be done in MetaTalk (MC's scripting language), but with about 835% less difficulty/more pleasure. One example: the Metacard GUI dev environment was created with Metacard and scripted with MetaTalk. (Metacard also has some functionality specific to each platform. For instance, you can mess with the registry on Win32; you can mess with the resource fork on MacOS; you can mess with the world on Unix).

THIRD: It does all those normal things you forget to ask about - read and write data, start and stop processes, figure out which OS it's running on, what time it is, etc.

FOURTH: It handles UDP and TCP socket connections. You can create internet-enabled apps. A sample HTTP server stack is part of the install, and some other things are available on MC's FTP site - an FTP client and a mail client, and I don't know what else.

I better stop. There's more, but I have a day job to sleep for.