Revolution is extensible through libraries and, for example, the system includes an XML library for reading, editing and creating XML data. This library is OK but not the best choice from a functionality and documentation viewpoint (it is one of the few areas where Revolution is weak on explanation).

There are two ways to overcome these problems: The first is to use the excellent from Sons of Thunder Software. The second is to use the chunking features of Revolution scripting -- somewhat easier than XML libraries but less flexible.

While Revolution is on the wordy side it is also quite easy to follow with little of the obscure syntactical "techiness" that makes many other modern languages hard to learn. Revolution also lends itself admirably to rapid iterative design processes such as user experience engineering.

What's amazing is that Revolution scripting works so well cross-platform and the publisher provides a lot of guidance on how to make applications function correctly on all of the supported platforms.

I've focused on client side programming with Revolution but there's a whole other side to Runtime Revolution: It can produce code for deployment as Web content (with the RevWeb browser and can be used for server side programming.