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Revolution isn’t just cross-platform, but a true multi-platform development tool. Projects can be created on Windows, Linux, UNIX, or Macintosh, transported easily between the platforms, and can target any of these platforms or all of them.

Because Revolution runs on all platforms, developers can debug on the target platform. One of the main benefits of high-level development tools is avoiding the code-compile-run-test cycle; attempting to deliver to another platform automatically, without being able to debug on that platform, defeats the purpose. Revolution allows developers to debug on the target platform, boosting efficiency.

Revolution creates single-file applications, simplifying deployment — a strength it shares with REALbasic.

Revolution’s event model is more complete than REALbasic’s.¹⁵

One of Revolution’s greatest strengths is its interactive and incremental development environment. Revolution is unusual, even among HLD tools, in that it models the development process as incremental changes to a memory image. The developer can modify and debug the code and interface of a project as the project runs. The traditional HLD tool development cycle of code-run-test is further improved to simply code-test, without having to restart the application from the beginning each time in order to debug it. This greatly speeds development. REALbasic, in comparison, takes a more traditional view of development as editing source code.

Revolution supports regular expressions, un-typed variables, chunk expressions, and associative arrays, a strong benefit in developing file- and text-processing applications.

Revolution provides high-level access to Internet protocols: fetching a web page from any web server requires only a single command:

get url "http://www.yahoo.com"

Revolution’s development environment can be modified and extended to improve developer efficiency. Repetitive development tasks can easily be automated. Revolution’s development environment is created in Revolution, giving the developer direct control and excellent capabilities.

Revolution’s language, Transcript, is English-like, and therefore easier for beginners to learn than any language to date. A single object space means that any object can refer to any other object and its properties by name, id, or numerical reference. Support for global variables simplifies communication between routines.

At the same time, Transcript offers great power to the skilled developer. getProp and setProp handlers allow the encapsulation of custom properties. Parameters can be passed by value or by reference. Blocks of Transcript can be built and executed on the fly in deployed applications.