Rev 4.5 is in beta testing now. That much is publicly known. So while it would violate my NDA to say anything more specific than that, I can say that some of the new featuers are looking Pretty Darn Fine.

In many respects this is a clean-up release, addressing some issues people have been asking for. But that's not to suggest you won't find a few Wows in it. The balance of new features with a broad range of bug fixes makes this fothcoming release quite promising.

Along the way we're seeing some advancements with the RevWeb browser plugin, and down the road Kevin has noted that he has plans for enhancements to the Linux engine as well, which will be a real boon to those of us enamored of Ubuntu and other fine distros.

And speaking of Linux distros, check out the Link of the Week at the right of this page. Andre comes through again in high style, with a new Linux distro aimed specifically at Rev developers.

- Richard Gaskin
editor, revJournal

Benchmarking Performance in RevTalk
Tips for getting the most out of the speed of the Rev engine.

Interview with Andre Garzia
The author of RevOnRockets shares his insights on RevServer, the web, and the value of the great outdoors.

New revJournal Blog
Yep, finaly joined the 21st century here with the new Rev-based blog.

Interview with Jerry Daniels
Jerry discusses tRev, software design, coding, and life in this new inteview.

The Reactor Lab
In this article Dr. Herz introduces The Reactor Lab, a framework for deploying Rev-based simulations over the Internet.

Commands and Private Handlers
This article by Sarah Reichelt shows you how to make the most of these two new scripting language features in Rev 2.8.1.

With WordLib, Curry Kenworthy has done an impressively thorough job of allowing you to import a variety of Word and OpenOffice word processing formats into Rev fields.

This library parses the data in the Word file you pass to it, and renders Rev-native HtmlText from it to handle every element common to both Word and Rev, including font, size, bullets, most style attributes, and even hyperlinks, tables, footnotes, and embedded images.

Supported file formats are MS Word 2007 (.docx, .docm, .xml), MS Word 2003 (.xml), OpenOffice (.odt), and MS Word 97-2003 (.doc, limited support).

The demo version is free and shows off all of the library's features within the Rev IDE.

A license for using WordLib in your standalones costs just $50, a fraction of what it would cost to write something like this yourself.

The library API is simple to use and well thought out, with enough high-level support to make many uses simple one-liners, and with enough detailed calls to let you integrate the library into your scripts pretty much however you like.

Nicely done, Curry!