Week ending March 24, 2008

In the wild

REBOL/Services Overview

Henrik has posted a short how-to guide for getting up to speed with REBOL/LNS (RebServices) HMK Design Blog

Nicomdb

John Geomol Niclasen merges the NicomDB into one script. nicomdb

More John. :)

Geomol has also published a link to a IFF ILMB loader.

Electronic Arts IFF ILBM loader:
iff.r
Can handle 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color images, HAM6 images (4096 colors) and HALFBRITE (64 colors). HALFBRITE hasn't been tested yet, as I couldn't find such an image easily. Handle both compressed and non-compressed images. This is an example, where rebcode would help a lot, as a 320x200 image can take several seconds to uncompress.
Usage:

iff-image: load-iff %some_picture.iff
img: iff-image/as-image

img now is a REBOL image!, than can be viewed like:

view layout [image img]

TRETBASE looking for testers

If you visit Altme REBOL3,
check out the TRETBASE forum. This is a little engine that could.

db/search test [[age = 40][n r now/time/precise]]

Returns a dataset block with record number, the n and the data record, the r and exactly when it was fetched for all records with age 40. This source code is still closed for testing, but if get a chance, sign up. The documentation has gone public at TRETBASE on Mediafire file sharing. The REBOL scripting possibilities with TRETBASE are nearly endless.

rebol.org

A more less page pager.

pager.r. A fairly full featured console more script, in my, the author's, humble opinion. Search with f and r, skip by page or by line, forwards and back, line numbers; h for help.

>> more/num system

will let you peruse the reflection of REBOL at your leisure.

A layout editor and reb site highlight

Building on the REBOL Quick Start: Part 5 - Files, Directories, and Playing Music R.v.d.Zee adds a new builder tool to rebol.org with layout-writer.r. R.v.d.Zee also added a script to illustrate Reb Sites.

Rebol Technologies

New REBOL 3 webpage posted.

Discussion about the new page on the blog and then there is the REBOL 3 Project Home Page. Please Note: This is a developer's page, for those people involved of the trial runs of the new REBOL 3 release. The entries are a work in progress describing a work in progress.

Special Thanks

There are a few key players in the work that is REBOL. For the 2.7.6 release, special thanks go to Brian Hawley for his efforts in porting and polishing the new mezzanines.

Cheers from The Rebol Week

The week ending 16 March 2008

REBOL 2.7.6 Released

Yes, we do have a 2.7.6 release. The release page details the changes found in this latest incarnation. As of this date, only Windows 32 and Linux builds are available, but OSX, and Solaris core are following. Also, there is likely to be a special build with Rebcode enabled. The SDKs also include encmdview which I don't think I've seen since before 2005!

Of course this has impacted a little on REBOL3 development but the intention is to try and work on enhancements for REBOL2 that will also improve REBOL3.

IMAP?

Gabriele let slip that he has developed de-novo a new protocol for handling IMAP to help qtask provide webmail. The current REBOL2 IMAP protocol basically just gives the same level of functionality as POP3, but Gabriele's work is much more comprehensive, and he claims that qtask's email manager is now close to the functionality of Thunderbird. The even better news is that he hopes to use most of this code for REBOL3.

DOM Level 3 Implementation

Rudolph Meijer announced a pretty complete DTD implementation and is looking for testers. Source is not being released at this time, but may be made available depending on how the testing goes. I guess he's saying that if there are too many bugs he won't release the source.

Other Announcements

Geomol has released his relational database under the name NicomDB. GPL.

Oldes has updated his code colorizer.

Jerry Tsai shows how traditional Chinese can be printed to the console in REBOL3 with the current unicode implementation.

The Week Ending 9 March 2008

Peter Wood brings great news on his efforts with Olivier Auverlot to translate the book 'REBOL - A Programmer's Guide's into English.

==
In March 2007, Olivier Auverlot published his second major book on ÒREBOL Ð Guide du programmeurÓ. Written in his native French the book has been well received, not least by Carl Sassenrath: ÒYes, Olivier has done it again with another good book on REBOL.Ó

Olivier and I have been working on an English translation, "REBOL - a programmer's guide" for a little while now. The book will eventually be published in both printed and electronic form on lulu.com. The prices are likely to be Euro 25.00 for the printed edition and Euro 16.99 for the portable document format version (pdf) version. (For those of you outside the Euro zone, Lulu also provides prices in Pounds Sterling and US Dollars.)

As the translation is likely to take some time to complete, we are providing exclusive previews of each chapter for those who don't want to wait until the whole book has been translated. The previews will only be available until the complete book is ready. Each chapter will be published as a pdf once it is available and will cost Euro 2.99.

The first chapter "Discover Rebol in an hour" is a hands-on introduction to Rebol for programmers following the development of an automated File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client. It covers many facets of this highly productive language. It is available today at http://www.lulu.com/content/2092020

The next three chapters, "The Rebol Language", "GUI, graphics and sound" and "Networking and the Internet" will be available within the next few days.

Olivier is the author of the book; I am the author of any mistakes that have crept in during the translation.
==

The Week Ending 2 March 2008

Replacement for your built-in EDITOR

A text editor is born, intended to replace the built-in EDITOR.
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/ctx-text-for-edit-panel.r
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/edit-panel.r
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/editor.r
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/demo-edit-panel.r
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/demo-editor.r

New REBOL Web Site from the French community

Visit http://reboleur.free.fr/

Henrik release LIST-VIEW 0.0.52 released.

History: http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/docs/list-view-history.html
Source: http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view.r
Source for 0.0.51: http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view51.r
Docs: http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/docs/list-view.html
Demos: http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/demos/

UTF-8 in REBOL 3.0 alpha release

A sneek peak at UTF-8 support in REBOL 3 release (alpha). Find out more from Carl's blog. http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0106.html

QuarterMaster Version 0.2.1 Release

Featuring:
- new controllers;
- file upload;
- reorganised for better console-running mode; (hopefully) better namespace handling;
user and session handling ready

http://www.ross-gill.com/QM/

Tested on Apache. Tested briefly on Cheyenne.

DocKimbel: Windows services support library for REBOL 1.0.0 released.

Download : http://softinnov.org/rebol/nt-services.shtml

Maxim abour to reunleash himself on Revault? [comment: 3-feb-2008]

Is Maxim suggesting a released date for his work on Revault?

Taken from blog discussion at http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog.r?view=0105#comments

At the devcon last year I had a chat with a few people about Revault.

unfortunately for the better part of last year, I was not able to do much programming, for personal reasons. And thus revault has been asleep for a while.

There are quite a lot of people interested in the idea and even some volunteers for managing it, and even hosting it.

The idea was to do more than just a central file storage, but hosting teams and organisations able to review code, stamp approvals, and organise "sets" and compilation of modules and even single function submissions and such.

I am comming back to programming in the next few weeks, so will again restart the initative...

I even had the site designed and forms for submission working.

time to get that online and organised.

Geomol: finished v. 1.0.0 of 6502 assembler:

http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/language/asm6502.r
It defines the asm6502 function, which take 6502 assembler as text input and produces 6502 machine code (opcodes). Might be a good example of parsing in REBOL.

Geomol: A first version of a MOS 6502 workbench tool is ready:

do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/language/m6502wb.r
It'll load the 6502 assembler and emulator. It's a tool to compile 6502 assembler programs to machinecode and run it with the rebcode emulator. It's possible to see the 6502 registers and flags. Both asm6502.r and em6502.r has been updated.

DocKimbel release Cheyenne v0.9.18 beta.

Download at http://softinnov.org/tmp/cheyenne-r0918.zip

Oldes: paragliding contest visualisation made in Rebol/Flash dialect

- http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/xsider/
[Actually it's world-wide satellite mapping allowing zooming and scrolling in the browser.]