A summary of what's happening in the REBOL community.

REBOL 3 news and other sundries. April 2009

REBOL Release 3


R3 really heats up


If you haven't been following the progress, you may be missing out. Recent developments include:


  • GNU/Linux versions of the alpha releases. R3 alpha Releases

  • DECODE and ENCODE functions. CODECs for PNG, GIF, BMP and JPEG included so far

  • New Documentation wiki. REBOL 3 Documentation or type docs from a console

  • A whole new REBOL chat environment. Just type chat from an alpha console

  • Bug tracker accessible by typing bugs from the console

  • Modules are getting a good duff over. R3 Modules

  • ... so much more

REBOL Release 3 is FOR us, and it is partly reliant ON us. Opening up development for community involvement comes with some level of risk. REBOL developers will have to show that putting REBOL at that risk is worthwhile and become involved in productive and effective ways.

The alpha releases await your testing, input and betterments.
Dig in. The water is fine and getting better by the minute.



In the wild


REBOL Rock'n'Roll


Nick Antonaccio rocks out REBOL!
Ode to REBOL mp3



REBOL chats pass 100,000


The rebol.org archives of Altme traffic have surpassed 100,000 entries. There is a lot of life packed into the REBOL3 Altme world.



Cheers once again from the REBOL Week crew.

Labels:




2008 user.r rebol Of The Year

2008 user.r rebol Of The Year


Ashley Trüter


Ashley Trüter of Dobeash Software has been named the first recipient of the user.r rebol Of The Year award.

Ashley's consistently kind professionalism is a testament to the REBOL way.

We all wish to congratulate Ashley and to thank him for his immeasurable contributions to REBOL development. user.r is proud to present the first annual roty to our good Mr. Trüter.



Cheers from the REBOL Week crew. It's going to be a good year.




Period ending 24th Dec 2008

Henrik offering insights into the unreleased R3 GUI:



As far as I can tell there are animation effects in it as well as
a small suite of debug tools. Each source file is really small, around
2-8 kb with a few going above 10 kb. Fully commented and very clean

More information is available at
http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r?post=r3wp453x7314


SQLite Driver by Ashley 1.0.6 Update


Mac OS X now uses the v2 API and newer dylib path. SQLite/version now contains version number as a tuple!

It is now available at: http://www.dobeash.com/download.html


RebGUI build#117


Release notes here: http://www.dobeash.com/RebGUI/release.html#section-11


REBOL.org, October 2008: improved ways to look for scripts:


http://www.rebol.org/boiler.r?display=whats-new

Better script search abilities in REBOL.org:
http://www.rebol.org/boiler.r?display=introduction.html

It's never been easy finding out how to join any of the REBOL Altme worlds (such as REBOL3). You can see many theads on the Mailing List and REBOLtalk were newcomers are trying to find the way in.

Now the REBOL Library is trying to make it a little easier and obvious. The Library's Altme pages have a "join REBOL3 world" page that explains the process, and can accept requests (which are passed on to the REBOL3 Administrators):
http://www.rebol.org/aga-join.r


Chris < QM > Version 0.3.8


QuarterMaster (aka QM) is a REBOL web-based framework. Version 0.3.8 is now available.

http://www.ross-gill.com/QM/

Fixed some Cheyenne glitches, works now with .exe version (see QuickStart guide).


New experimental version 1.3 of MySQL driver


Doc "I've just upload a new experimental 1.3 version of MySQL driver supporting mutiple queries, stored procedures and multiple result sets. Reading mutiple results is done by calling COPY for each result.

Download at http://softinnov.org/tmp/mysql-protocol-41.r

New version 1.3 of new MySQL driver released as beta. (same URL).

Changes:

- Fixed the multiple result sets end-of-stream issue. Now an extra COPY will
return NONE, marking the end of the data stream.

- Fixed error message parsing for protocol 4.1.

- Added SQL request delimiter property to port/locals/delimiter (default: #";")


REBOL DevCon 2008 -- an e-only event


Nick confirms DevCon2008 -- an e-only event) for 27-dec-2008, 20:00 UTC:
http://rockfactory.us/events/devcon.cgi


REBOL - A Programmer's Guide (translated English version is now available)


Peter Wood is pleased to announce that the electronic version of "Rebol - A programmer's guide" is now available at http://www.lulu.com/content/5382304 priced at 15.99 Euros.

The printed version will be available within the next two to three weeks and will be priced at 25 Euros.

The book's introduction and table of contents can be freely downloaded from http://www.auverlot.fr/index.php?perma=1224333460


Peter Wood also says: The anglicised source code of the book "Rebol - A programmer's guide" can now be downloaded from the book's page at http://auverlot.fr/index.php?perma=1224333460

It is quite possible that I may have introduced the odd bug during their translation. If you find any please let me know.




Period ending 19th October 2008

Chocolat is now Vanilla free!



Sabu Francis is renaming his Vanilla 0.6.3 release to Chocolat at the request of the original Vanilla authors. He will be setting up a website sometime when time permits to host the code.

HylaFAX web interface



Graham Chiu has released a light weight web interface to HylaFAX, the open source enterprise fax server software. It uses Cheyenne, and RSP pages. Internet Explorer users can view faxes in a REBOL plugin that allows them to rotate and ink on the fax. Chrome, and FF users will just see a PNG representation.

Cheyenne and mod-rest



Graham has been RESTing way too much of late and has persuaded dockimbel to help him create a mod-rest.r for Cheyenne! This is so that a REST interface can be coded to HylaFAX.

VIDinc



Well, we have no idea of what Carl is going to name his new baby. I favour god for graphical object dialect ... but I guess we don't want religion mixed with programming.

It is currently being alpha tested by Henrik and BH .. see this styles document. Henrik has posted lots of screenshots and a couple of movies.

REBOL not for me??



Carl has decided to refocus REBOL away from the ordinary programmer ... being dismayed at seeing so much REBOL code written in C or BASIC style. A few of us had a touch of self doubt reading this blog ... ahhh, who cares, as long as we enjoy what we are doing.




Slightly later in September 2008

The web is the thing


Vanilla


Sabu Francis has modified Vanilla.



Vanilla is a REBOL implementation of Web Log and Wiki, potentially the first bliki system ever developed.



Sabu has released a version of Vanilla, labelled as 0.6.3 at sabufrancis.com.

A legacy contributor to the Vanilla system, Andreas Bolka, would like everyone to know that this is not an official release of the Vanilla system, originally by Chris Langreiter.



Sabu's software is based on the last release, 0.6.2, from 2004 and is documented as a modification in accordance with the Academic Free License version 2.0. This blogger is making this up, but perhaps this mod could be named Vanilla chocolate-chip. ;)



Regardless, Vanilla is a gem of REBOL software and can easily be installed along with an Apache webserver. Interest in ensuring this system works with the Cheyenne webserver means more news may be posted shortly.



For details of the newest, click to sabufrancis.com.



For general information on everything Vanilla and to see it in action, click to vanillasite.at.




Updated HTTP


Our good Graham Chui, flagship at Synapse Direct, has posted a link to an updated HTTP scheme for REBOL. Implements DELETE and PUT and adds the ability to send cookies, woohoo!, including with the GET verb.



See all this niceness at rebol.wik.is.



Samples of the simplicity.

REBOL []
URL: http://somesite.moc
read/custom URL [ put %file [ Cookie: "authtoken=foo" ]]
read/custom URL [ put "some text" ]
read/custom URL [ get "" [ Cookie: "authtoken=anotherfoo" ]]


As is becoming this author's favoured rebol rally, Go Graham Go!



Cheers from the REBOL Week crew




Later in September 2008

Cheyenne


Cheyenne 0.9.19 Preview Release


Nenad has just published a link to the next Preview Release of the Cheyenne web server



Main changes are :


  • an improved PHP support (now works reliably)

  • sandboxed RSP webapps (as much as it's possible in R2)

  • now compatible with REBOL 2.7.6

  • bugfixes



See ChangeLog.txt file in the archive for complete description.



Support Cheyenne. Run a webserver. Go Doc Go!

Get the current zip from cheyenne-server.org.



Rebol Technologies


Name the GUI contest


Carl has given interested parties a chance to win a REBOL Release 3 T-Shirt. Perhaps the first ever R3 T.

See Name the GUI for complete details and a chance to offer up the winning name or acronym.



Cheers from the REBOL Week Team,
REBOL on, REBOL on.




Somewhen in September, 2008

Syllable Server


In the "you scratch my back ..." department


This is a (reformatted for this blog ... mistakes may well be mine) reprint of a news release regarding Syllable Server. Many thanks to Kaj de Vos and the Syllable team. Syllable is now listed on the GNU/Linux distribution website, distrowatch/syllable. Well done and congratulations.


News Release


The third release of Syllable Server has been published. This is an
important release, because it is the first one that focused on making
the system actually usable as a server. A number of popular servers were added and configured, and also several innovative REBOL software stacks


Out of the imaginary box, Syllable Server is now ready for such things as accepting remote SSH log-ins over the network, running a web server on the Cheyenne cheyenne-server.org REBOL server, running an FTP server and several more.


Special attention has been paid to programmability, with support for developing Model-View-Controller web applications in QuarterMaster QuarterMaster and networking applications with the REBOL/Services REBOL/LNS Service Oriented Architecture.


The Genode genode.org Nitpicker windowing system is also included.

Read the rest in the full changelog. An extensive manual manual was also written, which is easy to follow.

As usual, both a BitTorrent download found here (preferred) and a regular download are available (80 MB 7-Zip archive). Please use the torrent if you can.

I hope you can do something useful with this, and if you do, please let us know, maybe through dropping by at http://syllable.org .



Cheers from the REBOL Week crew. With announcments like this, it's going to be another good week.