The week ending 24th June 2007

AltME ‘REBOL 3’ World Archive

Rebol.org is now hosting the most complete archive of groups from the AltME ‘REBOL 3’ world.  Included in the archive are all posts from all groups tagged as [web-public], with permalinks to every post.

For example:

• A discussion on using dialects to build primers for other languages.
• Up-to-date minutes from IRUA meetings
• A rolling history of RebGUI

The AltME: ‘REBOL 3’ World.

Note: there are plans to make the archive fully searchable.  Posts may lag a day or so behind for the first few weeks.

CureCode

DocKimbel introduces CureCode: a small, fast, lightweight bugtracking tool, RSP based, open source, BSD license, needs Cheyenne to run.  See the !CureCode group in the REBOL 3 AltME world for more information.

Enhanced Area/Field Styles

Anton introduces an AREA/FIELD style with improved caret handling and rendering for center and right-aligned text:

First run View 2.7.5.3.1 and do this:

site: select load-thru http://www.rebol.net/reb/index.r [folder "Anton"]
clear find site %index.r
load-thru/update site/patch/caret-to-offset-patch.r

Do the main demo, showing patched AREA:

do-thru site/patch/demo-caret-to-offset-patch.r

Three patched styles; AREA, FIELD, INFO:

do-thru site/gui/demo-area.r
do-thru site/gui/demo-field.r
do-thru site/gui/demo-info.r

The initial experimental testing script:

do-thru site/patch/test-caret-to-offset-patch.r

Advantages:

• middle and right aligned text is now usable and works as one would expect, with the caret appearing in the correct position.
• you can render the caret how you like
• you can render the highlighting how you like

Disadvantages:

• lots of code to achieve the above
• probably slow performance with large areas, because images are being created on every redraw

In The Wild

HY turns a url into a navigable object, providing handy methods for manipulating urls.

R. v.d.Zee (short names this week) illustrates how to draw a round button in a box face, then how to redraw the button on mouse-over.

The week ending 17 June 2007

REBOL DevCon 2007 Videos

Videos for the REBOL DevCon 2007 are available for download at http://devcon2007.rebdocproj.org/

Onyx

Icarii (Aka) James Marsden, has released Onyx, a new draw based menu system released (demo). This is a prelude to creating an entire Draw based UI for his MMORPG.

URL : http://rebol.mustard.co.nz/onyx-demo.r

MySQL Driver

DocKimbel has released an update to the MySQL driver.

MySQL driver release v.1.1.2 Download at : http://rebol.softinnov.org/mysql

• Fix for an infinite loop issue when the server times out the connection (unix platforms).
  
• TCP keepalive option activated by default (for longstanding idle connections).
  
• Send-cmd function optimized to be a little bit faster and use less memory.
  
• Added new-lines markers to resulting recorsets.
  
• Added option to switch on/off new-lines marker through port/locals/newlines? flag.
  
• Recycle call removed from read-rows function. Should speed up the results a little bit.
  
• Minor source code cleanup.
  

Cheyenne

Dockimbel's Apache class webserver in 100Kb of REBOL code is now in beta, and being thrashed by beta testers in an attempt to weed out all the bugs. Cheyenne offers fast-cgi REBOL scripting, and is resistant to most all the classical web attacks, with 180 requests/second on the RSP test page on an AMD 3500+ processor. Maxim has now started work on a Remark module. Look for a download url in the near future as the 1.0 release approaches. In the meantime, the RSP documentation is available.

Rebol3

Not much of interest to most of us, as it was released only to a few tight lipped select developers .. but this image from Cyphre appears to confirm it is for real! Animation is also apparently 2-5x faster with primitive graphic objects.

dyDNS client

Daniel has written dns-sync, a dynamic DNS client, and intended to run as a cron job under Linux, or as a Windows task.

Mahjong

James Marsden gets a double mention due to the length of this week's blog .. his Mahjong using his own digitized tiles has been updated a few times in the past few weeks. The latest version is available at the same location.