The fortnight ending 22nd April 2007

DevCon 2007

Not long now before the Rebolling hordes descend upon Paris. New sessions include:

Ladislav Mecir: "Introduction to script preprocessing"

Sunanda: "REBOL Library internals" (I have a feeling this will include some measure of the recent Mailing List compression competitions)

Maxim Olivier-Adlhoch: "Public release of ELIXIR - Dataflow-driven Work Environment”"

Less than three weeks to go: DevCon 2007

OS X Bundles

Ashley uploaded documentation on creating OS X application bundles — perfect for distributing OS X REBOL/SDK applications. Graham notes this technique can be used to bundle the AltME binary.

Menu Style

Anton published a new “standard” menu style and demo. Download menu.r or try the demo from the REBOL/View console:

do http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/demo-menu.r

QuarterMaster

Chris introduces QuarterMaster, a framework for building web sites and applications. It's an early release concerned with nailing down the core engine. Efforts are currently focussed on Cheyenne compatibility.

Mailing List

Discussions include the merits and methods of creating PDF documentation (link) and designing a spell checker (link).

The week ending 8th April 2007

Rebol 3

Datatypes
To find out the datatypes built-in for REBOL 3, type 'help datatype!'

Among one of the requested enhancement to REBOL 3 is support for multi-tasking and interprocess communication.

New in REBOL 3, is a datatype called "task".

Will "task" could be your answer to multi-tasking and/or interprocecess communciation ?

Rebel Bulletin Board (RebelBB)

RebelBB is a forum for discussing REBOL programming.
Try the new beta release at http://www.digicamsoft.com/cgi-bin/rebelBBeta.cgi

Rebol.org

Skimp
Skimp is an indexing program written in REBOL.

Skimp was REBOL's community answer to Google.

REBOL Library's team original idea is to have Google index the mailing list archive via the Google SOAP API. However, months went by with Google not indexing much of the REBOL mailing list archive.

The REBOL community had rise to the challenge and contributed many great ideas to enhance Skimp to its latest state.

Many thanks to Sunanda and Peter Wood for putting these together.

More discussion on Skimp can be found at
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-message.r?m=rmlVYQC

Documentation for Skimp
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/documentation.r?script=skimp.r

One interesting application of Skimp will be to index REBOL3 AltMe world.

Skimp already has provision for such use. If you are interested to work on Skimp and indexing AltMe, contact Sunanda (or the REBOL Library Team).


Capture Screen
Capture Screen is a REBOL script that returns a screenshot as an image.

Contributed by Gregg Irwin and Christian Ensel

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=capture-screen.r

NOTE : This script was turnaround within 24hr on the mailing list from a request to do a screen capture. This definitely shows NOT just the power of REBOL but also the strength of the community.

REBOL API to Crystal Report
Christian Ensel has contributed an API to show, print and export Crystal Reports for REBOL.

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=crystal-reports.r

The week ending 1st april 2007

REBOL 3

Information on R3 is getting more and more precise :-) . The R3 blog just released a complete list of datatatypes and a VERY cool stack trace function which will help A LOT in ironing out errors.

Rebol.org

Somehow it seems Piotr Gapinski's RSS reader written in REBOL went completely unnoticed! but I'd like to raise a few cheers for this simple, effective and actually quite complete implementation of a stand-alone RSS reader.

Peter W A Wood released a script called make-word-list.r. Its a very complete REBOL script analyser which extracts any words it can find within any datatype!

REBOL3 Altme

Not much to say a part from the fact that its back online... I didn't get any strange effects when I logged back on, so it looks pretty clear so far.

On the backup Rebol World Altme world setup by graham (many thanks from a lot of us btw), There was a flurry of discussion about Rebgui

Are YOU the ultimate REBOL evangelist?

Carl over at REBOL Technologies is advertising for someone to help with the website and backups. Read the full post here

Mailing List

With altme down, we have witness a dramatic increase in Mailing list activity, reaching several years past levels, back when the ML used to be the main center of community collaboration.

a nice thread on doing screen capture within REBOL (without using the clipboard) was shown. Work on antidote continues, with stack and full internal datatype handling now reaching some measure of implementation and functionality. There was also a good discussion on words, pointers, indirection and contexts, delving deep into the binding and references complexities of REBOL... A good read for any REBOLer wanting to get to grips with advanced-level understanding of REBOL.