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

Period ending 17-July-2010

REBOL Gateway



Want to join the REBOL3 world? Well, this is a very involved way but apparently it works http://www.rebol.org/aga-join.r

A100 Hostkit for Windows Released



I can't tell you where to download it ... but if you look at Tuesday's posting by Carl in the private !REBOL3 Extensions channel on REBOL3 ALTME, you can find it. This hostkit is memorable in that the graphics is now inside the hostkit.

Bounties



The bounty for a /Library interface for R3 currently stands at US$600. It is not entirely clear if Ladislav is working on it or not. A bounty for OpenDBX REBOL2 bindings was picked up by yours truly and the code is here. What does it mean? It means that you now have access to all the databases supported by OpenDBX including access to binary blobs which never worked for me under ODBC.

JIRA Tracker for REBOL open source



I have setup a JIRA tracker for open source projects. JIRA is probably the best tracker out there, and normally comes with a hefty license fee but since we are using it to track open source projects, we have obtained a free open source license. I have the capacity to track a decent number of projects so if you want to use this instance to track your own open source project just contact me. And if you want to report any bugs in any of the current projects it is hosting, just sign up!

Quick and dirty associative database



By Chris Ross-Gill. REBOL2 only.

write meta/Chris/first "Christopher"
read meta/Chris/first
person: [user "Chris" first "Christopher" last "Ross-Gill"]
write meta/(person/user)/last person/last
write meta/Chris/added now
read meta/(person/user)


There's also a more limited version for REBOL3.

REBOL JIT compiler




JITteR is lightweight REBOL dialect that enables running JIT compiled functions directly from REBOL interpreter.
Such JIT compiled functions can be tens to hundreds times faster than REBOL equivalent code.
Usage of JITter is aimed on graphics routines, compressors, codecs, generators, number crunching algorithms and various other time-critical programming tasks.
The main idea of this project is not to clone all REBOL functionality but maintain compatibility in sense of JITteR -> REBOL way so any code written in JITteR can be executed(fallback) as plain REBOL function! without the need of touching the code.


Expect an Alpha release to developers this month from the author Cyphre

REOL3 Extension written in D



From Robert. See his first test. A D runtime is included in the DLL.

Scrum rules!



The R3GUI project is now being run by Robert using a modified scrum methodology. And yes, the team includes Carl as well as Cyphre, Ladislav, Henrik, and Rebolek. But all their work is still closed to the unwashed masses.

JDBC Bridge



This is a project that I worked on a few weeks ago. It creates a Java server that allows you to connect to any database with a JDBC driver. The Rebol client ( actually you could use any client that can use tcp ) connects to the server using a protocol. Interestingly the project is written in NetRexx and compiles to Java bytecode. Protocols for REBOL2 and REBOL3 have been written but need to be cleaned up.