The week ending 21st May, 2006

This weekly summary idea has been well received, and we now have 4 new contributors. Please welcome Sunanda, Volker, Max, and YekSoon.

Although we do not aspire to become an e-zine, like the much missed Rebol/Zine, we will be happy to accept small articles that we can publish within the constraints of the blog format.

Plugin
Discussions continue on the security model to be used by the plugin. A design document is being drafted by Josh, and should be available for comment within a couple of weeks.

Scripts
Anton has updated his batch-download.r script so that you can now skip a file, pause, and abort. Very useful stuff. Graham's demo using this script has been updated as well.

Vollker has released his mini RCS system named snapsets.

Henrik released version 0.0.41 of his very useful list-view - a powerful extension to the list style.

Gabriele released his structure matching and rewriting tool. With this you can match a structure using parse rules, and replace it with another. Sounds cool and potentially very useful especially in relation to the following news about contexts.

REBOL3
A context is a set of words, for example the arguments to a function or the members of an object. Prior to Rebol3 once a context was created, it could not be extended. But in some instances, this constraint will be released.

Bind will now expand contexts. So, instead of having to create a new object to add to a context, we will now be able to do this:

obj: make object! [a: 1]
word: bind 'b ob
set word 10
print obj
a: 1
b: 10

This is related to Rebol3 using modules which means allowing for multiple global contexts instead of a single global context, and similar to the Forth vocabulary.

AGG
As you know, AGG is now used by View as its rending engine. Recently AGG 2.4 was released, and is now able to render Flash shapes. Does this mean that View at some time in the future may be able to playback Flash movies?

RebolTalk
This web forum has now added a section specifically for Francophiles.

Orca
This Rebol clone has been chosen to be the default scripting language for Syllable, a GPL operating system. In the meantime a binary release is available.