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

The week ending 25th February

Mailing List



After taking a well-earned breather, the REBOL Mailing List server is back online. Once again, ML is the leading public square for all things REBOL.

REBOL Mailing List

Remark



Rebol Week's very own Max releases Remark:

"Remark allows you to create and manage a complete web site by creating static web pages which are built up from html tags which you define (plus any normal html, of course).

"The tags can be as simple or as sophisticated as you need and because you have access to the full power of REBOL's dialecting within them, you can truly create powerfull and simple to use tags."

Features:


  • Create your own html tags and use them within your pages. Allows programable tags, and static html based tags.

  • Multi-page management. Handles all the files in a web site recursively. Even creates dirs at destination, if new ones are added in source.

  • Multi-site management allows you to configure all of your sites to be used within the same ui, so you don't have to sprawl.

  • Synchronise source and release sites, copying only user-specified file types (ascii and binary types are separate lists).

  • Reasonably Fast. The more you leave as html, the faster remark parsing... so its easy to optimise, when this is an issue.

  • Simple GUI to let you update changes applied to source(s) on a click of a mouse.

  • Persistently reparsed source files, so that your tags can even use custom tags as part of the html code they generate. This means that the engine reparses until no more custom tags exist within the source page. Allows you to scale and leverage your html layout by creating low-level tags (like menus) and then assembling them in higher-order tags (like a header, footer or even an automatic per style template).

  • Includes a powerfull set of standard custom tags fully integrated within REBOL: pseudo-absolue-paths, code-view, auto-css, date/time, make-doc (forthcomming)

  • Page Templates can be built and then filled up by setting up layout and data entry tags.

  • CSS Friendly .

  • API defined Global REBOL values allows your custom tags to know where they are within a site and create tags which are page/section/path dependent, even though the same tag is used in all pages. As an example, menus can be different when the current page is a direct link to one of its menu items.

  • External config files, loaded at run time. Allows you to setup global and per site tags, templates and intrates all sites within one GUI.

  • Can be a very compact and scalable platform to GENERATE XML files for other softwares to use. Specifically because of Remark's persistent parsing nature. In a future release, remark will get explicit XML parsing tools.



Remark

Rebol.org



PSG AY-3-8910 Study by Marco: "This is a simple study for me to understand the basic principle of music generation.

"This script use rebcode (20 time faster) if present.

"Many thanks to Guest2 making me interrested on this subject (see his script %demo-ay.r)"

Run sequence encoded integer data sets by Christian, Romano and Sunanda: The fruits of the Mailing List competition a few weeks back to provide an API for compacting/compressing sets of integers.

Origami Demo by François Jouen: "Playing with Rebol on Ultra Mobile Personal Computer. Use keyboard arrows for options!"

Calculate working days between two dates by Sunanda: The product of YAMLC (Yet Another Mailing List Competition). "Given two dates, and a list of holidays that occur between them, returns the number of work days between those two days. With the /non refinement, will return the number of non-working days between the two dates."

DevCon 2007



More information on accommodation has been posted on the DevCon web site:

DevCon - Locations

Just over ten weeks left to get organised!

AltME



Rebol3 world currently down as of 1st March 2007 9:00 GMT+13




The week ending 18th Feb 2007

MS Windows



Oldes' published first version of Windows .LNK file parser

For a demonstration, open your rebol console and paste this in:


do http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/projects/ucs2/latest/ucs2.r
do http://oldes.multimedia.cz/rebol/shortcuts.r
repeat i 7 [print ["=== test" i "==="]
parse-lnk rejoin [http://oldes.multimedia.cz/tests/test i %.lnk]]


RebGUI


Many updates this week. Ashley has made many changes and improvements to RebGUI,
and committed several builds to SVN bringing it up to build #58.

Some of the changes:


  • Info option now prevents tabbing
  • Added action-on-tab block to behaviors (works in same manner as action-on-enter)
  • Fixed modal requestor problem

  • Button widget rewritten to take full advantage of AGG
    and fix some anomalies (e.g. actions now fire on button up instead of button down, replaced
    'active facet with options [info], hover effect no longer "sticks" when a popup is called
    from a button, etc). And all this in 1/4 of the code! ;)

  • Numerous widget fixes and enhancements to many widgets.

  • tab-panel now only fires action on initialization if options [action] specified
  • spinner now fires action after arrow click
  • arrow has default size of 5x-1 (meaning you can now create non-square arrows ... needed by spinner above)

  • Fixed 2 major tabbing issues:

    1. tab-on-enter now fires after calculation of next field (so works correctly with show-focus)
    2. tabbing within tab-panel fixed (next field is prevented from looking at non-displayed tabs)



Mailing list problems


Currently down due to some type of server failure. Problem is being addressed.


Rebol.org



rse-ids is quite possibly the first REBOL script to be released along with all its test cases (making it easy for anyone else to extend or repair the script).
Test data cases by Peter Wood. Test environment code by Christophe "REBOLtof" Coussement.

(posted for Anton)




The week ending 12th February 2007

Volkers turn and I am a bit out of touch lately. Scanning my usual sources


AltME

Reichart promised to fix the top 10 annoyances in AltME if we could all agree. We came up with list - here's hoping!

Mailing List

Graham wrote a working script (send-gmail.r) that sends secure mail to Gmail using Gmail's smtp server, and a nearly working esmtps protocol that you can use to send secure mail using a modified send version.

Needs Rebol/Command because of the use of SSL, so, if you need secure email, time to upgrade to Rebol/Command!

Sunandas competition is still running and generating traffic. :)
Its about tuning the search in the Mailinglist-archive. Not really needed IMHO, but people have fun :)


Rebol.org

Seems someone emulated an old synthesizer, PSG AY-3-8912 of MSX. 8-bit homecomputer IIRC. Should test it :)

And something to experiment with Rebol's AGG draw.


Rebol3

Carl was asking about the use of Context of whether it should be deprecated in favour of a flavour of object.


DEVCON 2007

Hotels are being sought for everyone to stay in, but at this time of the year, there is going to be competition with the universities (Sorbonne) and other colleges for conference accommodation.




The fortnight ending 5th February, 2007

DevCon 2007



Some news on the hotel information is now starting to appear, There is also some new features like an iCal event schedule and the session info now seems to be ready to be populated. Go Go Go, Register and make a session to share your REBOL insight. Be sure to visit the news page for the latest info about the devcon! http://devcon2007.rebdocproj.org/news/news.html

This year's conference will be held in Paris, France on May 10-11.



Mailing List



Sunanda's a Coding Challenge, was a smash... many of you submitted some code and the Mailing list is ablaze with discussion... the competition is still on. the first step of the competition is over or nearly so, but 2 other challenges have been set aflame. An update to come as I get more explicit details on the results so far. :-).



Tips from the masters


Anton Rolls and VID words

Anton has written up a little doc on how to improve your VID styles by adding to their dialects, using words...
read all about it here: http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/doc/vid-words-dialect.txt although this is an integral part of VID, it seems not many users knew about it or are using this handy feature of VID. Thanks for putting some light on this!




REBOL 3



It seems that the community is quite happy with the proposed R3 architecture in general. We can only hope that most if not all of the goodies will be ready for the devcon, so that REBOL Technologies can demo it all to our amazement. In case you missed it, here is the “REBOL 3.0 Component Architecture”




Commercial Spotlight!


This is a new column, We'll be happy to help anyone put a little bit of press coverage on their tools, as long as they're coded in whole or in part in REBOL. We'd like to post info on commercial uses of REBOL based technologies as often as possible, where we show off commercial/corporate applications written in REBOL. Many of you are doing incredible stuff, yet little is know about this high-level (sometimes mission-critical) work being done daily with REBOL.


We might also Put info about older applications written in REBOL too (with the author's permission).



„My Value Driver“ - released by BrainNet / Saphirion
Get your purchasing prices down! „My Value Driver“ provides total product cost transparency with the method of cost analysis for goods and products. This is a tool put to life by Robert M. Muench, nice to see your efforts come to fruition. Note that the app is currently only released in German, but an english version is expected within the next few months.

Here are key highlights of „My Value Driver“:
- Uncover unknown hidden margins in your supplier's product calculation.
- Find out the real costs of production of a product.
- Get the difference to your actual purchased prices.
- Simulate new scenarios: „How is the cost impact if you increase the purchasing volume?“
- See global sourcing cost advantages on the spot.
- Get the best arguments in price negotiations.
- Spring your own product calculation on your supplier!

full information is available in PDF format.
screen shots: one, two, three, four, five, six



SOME TOOL releases



TOOLBAR v0.0.9 - Henrik: "I've uploaded version 0.0.9 of TOOLBAR. You can read about it at http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol in the two latest blog posts, where I also highlight a bug in REBOL/View that causes a crash because of TOOLBAR."

Note: removed erred info about REBOL blog use by Henrik... sorry <ed>



Image panning VID face - Also by Henrik
... read more about it on the above link.



!Liquid v0.6.4 - by Maxim Olivier-Adlhoch
- cleared a few bacteria (microbugs ;-)
- better support for linked containers
- fixed orphaned links (named yet non-linked inputs).
- start of commit concept (just the func layout)
- started !plug core reference docs

to download the lib: http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/download-a-script.r?script-name=liquid.r
docs on liquid project: http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/steel/liquid/index.html
!plug reference: http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/steel/liquid/plug/plug-reference.html