LiveCode Server

Here at On-Rev, we make extensive use of LiveCode Server internally for scripting – you’ll see a lot more filenames ending in .lc than you might in .sh, purely for the reason that LiveCode Server is great for making scripts that are a lot more readable than, say, a bash script, and we can drop in shell commands with ease where necessary.

One recent feature that was introduced in LiveCode 6.6 was the ability to use hashbangs (#! /path/to/livecode) in LiveCode server scripts instead of script open and close tags (<?lc ?>). This means that we can have scripts which look like this:

#!/path/to/livecode-server
put “hello world at” && the millisecs

Instead of this:

<?lc
put “hello world at” && the millisecs
?>

The difference is that the latter has to be passed as a file to the LC Server exectuable, which then parses the code for output. This makes sense where LC Server is integrated into a web server software for serving webpages, but if we were doing this in a command line, it would look like this:

root@mybox [~]# /path/to/livecode-server ./script.lc

Whereas by using hashbangs, we can now execute the script directly, as the script contains the information for how it should be executed:

root@mybox [~]# ./script.lc

This seems like a minor change, but it brings the LC Server engine closer to how scripting for system utilities should function in a Unix environment, and allows me to tidy up some of the internal systems we use a little bit.

Additionally, work on the On-Rev client has been ongoing and we hope to release an update as soon as some of the last technical hurdles are overcome – we hope to send out a notification about this to all our On-Rev customers in the near future.