The week ending 14th May, 2006

The REBOL community, though small, spreads itself thinly across the globe, and in many different forms of electronic publishing. There has been a preference in particular for Rebolers to hide in dark secretive worlds even away from other Rebolers though this has improved with the publishing of some content from Altme Rebol3 to rebol.net.

This blog is therefore an attempt to summarise the weeks news and activities in the Rebol community.

RebGUI
Robert announced that he had contracted Cyphre to work on some fixes, and to build a tree widget. Anton announced he has finally debugged the area widget of some long standing issues.

http://www.rebol.net/altweb/rebol3/chat303.html

Mailing List
For the first time in living memory, a poster had to be removed from the list for creating a lot of ill feeling. Let's hope it is the last time.

Gregg, Ladislav and others discussed a collect function implementation. What does a collect function do?? Apparently it is designed to reduce some dancing that you do when you wish to accumulate values.

So, say you had a function to grab all the results from a database query

get-results: has [ result ][
    insert db-port {select * from database}
    result: copy []
    foreach record copy db-port [
        append result record
    ]
    result
]

This would be written

get-results: has [ result ][
      insert db-port {select * from database}
      collect result [ 
              foreach record copy db-port [result: record ]
      ]
]

Browser Plugin
Work on the Internet Explorer, and now Firefox plugins has recommenced with the welcome return of Josh Mitts.

New Scripts
I released a download manager using Anton's batch-download function. It was needed for my purposes to allow users to select the downloads required for Synapse EMR, and grabs files from multiple sites. License is BSD.

Prolific's Edgar released a wrapper for ImageMagick, and I also released a wrapper for Dosadi's Eztwain library.

Gabriele continues to study the sources to TeX so that pdf-maker2 can do flowing text, justification, and pagination. He did release a pre-alpha version of make-doc3 to me so that I could experiment with a LaTeX emitter, and the early version of this was released.