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

The week ending 25th March 2007

Books!



A second new book from Olivier Overlot
Rebol/IOS, administration and programation, and again in French.

Rebol.org



Big number support in a
script
from neoreb and discussion.

New builds coming



If you have a critical bug that needs fixing please make sure that Gabriele Santilli (contact is: gabriele at rebol, or altme) knows of it. He is in charge of selecting which bugs get fixed.

Rebol3



Carl has been asking for comments on :arg behaviour which means comments are working again! There's also discussion on object modification, and port behaviours.

Rebol3 AltME



Richard Westlake is still trying to recover data off the Rebol3 hard drive, and Graham has revived his "backup" AltME world "Rebol-World" and some discussions have shifted there. New users should login as guest/guest and ask for an account.

Mail List



The mail list was a little bit wonky but seems to be working adequately now.

There remains a strange interaction for GMail users, apparently when GMail is configured to forward all mail to another mail account. Mail from yourself does not make it to the mail list.

Peter Wood found "a workaround to Gmail's inadvertent censorship of your own postings to the ML. If you send the message via the Gmail web-interface, next time to access Gmail using POP3 you get a copy."

There was a discussion about contexts and reflection.

RebGUI



RebGUI Beta 2 released.

Release notes here: http://www.dobeash.com/RebGUI/release.html
Fully updated documentation here: http://www.dobeash.com/rebgui.html

This release contains almost 4 months of fixes/enhancements.

Antidote



Maxim talked about his new "rebol interpreter within rebol" which he is developing
and might turn out to be useful for sandboxing remote code in a restricted environment.

We await his first release with interest.

This week's posting from Anton and Graham.




The week ending 18th March 2007

Rebol.org

As mentioned in the comments recently Steeve recently released a MSX emulator that allows you to play the old game galaga. Sound isn't too wonderful but that's a Rebol limitation at present. And it uses rebcode.

Other updated or new scripts include makedoc2.r, xpath.r ( a proof of concept of an xpath interpreter ), rss.r ( RSS reader ), steganography.r ( hide text in the noise pixels of an image ), photoprint.r, and colormatch15.r ( similar to the 1987 amiga version to create accurate colors ).

SDK

New beta SDKs 2.7.5 have been released for Windows, Linux and OSX. It is unclear how they differ from 2.7.4.

AltME

Rebol3 remains down and does not seem likely to return since rebol.net has been live again for the last few days. One benefit of this is the resurgence of the mailing list. However, if you need live help, AltME is still a very important asset for the lone Reboler. There are various other evolutionary benefits, but rather than prattle on how this strengthens the Rebol community, I have just resurrected the rebol-world. If you don't recall your login, or don't have one, then login as guest/guest, and we'll create one for you.

View

Anton has published some docs on popface system and on the face/options dialect.

Rugby



Henrik is hosting the Rugby source code and has made some bug fixes.




Week ending 11th March 2007

Sadly not much to report, as well as an inability to report! With Rebol.net down, the mailing list down, and AltME Rebol3 world down, all my stored information on recent Rebol news remains locked away within the AltME application. There used to be an AltME offline mode allowing one to browse stored data, but that went south in a recent update.

Putting all developer communications in one broken basket really seems a bad idea with what feels like repeated outages with the Rebol.net server.

At least that gives us time to continue programming, and I can report there is now some documentation on the tree widget for RebGUI. However, the behaviour is somewhat unexpected with the widget collapsing on a click rather than remaining expanded. Once communications become restored, I hope we can discuss how this widget should ideally act.