The Rebol Week

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year

2011-12-24T07:11:00.000-08:00

I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new Year.

I will not continue to publish on "The Rebol Week" blog.

I will concentrate on "Red Chronicle" brand and continue to support DocKimbel's project : Red programming language

Nicolas

News from Robert Muench about R3 project !

2011-07-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

"I have some knews regarding R3.
In the last two days I had longer calls with Carl and decided how to move R3 forward.
This is how it will be done:
- The RMA team will help to get some burden from Carl's shoulder and work on open issues. This will be setup in that we get partial access to the necessary code parts and can work on these.
- We are going to extend our internal testing infrastructure etc on these new R3 releases and run it against our applications we crate
- Carl and I will have regular calls to discuss the status and things where we need his advise etc. So, to keep the loop closed and gain more speed
- I will meet with Carl in person on 23rd Juli to discuss further things
- Unitil that we want to get most administrative setup done, so that we are ready to go

We are going to drive the priorities by the things RMA needs. This shouldn't be a problem for anyone because if you are going to use R3 for serious development than you will need it as well.

The thing is, that we are not going to jump-start for every requested feature etc. We know there is a lot to do and we will work through it step-by-step. And, this is not because we don't care what you all state here. Definetly not. I want to move R3 forward as fast as possible. This needs concentration, focus and pushing to finally get it done. At the end of the day the only thing that counts is, if we make it to make R3 stable enough for prime time development.

So, stay tuned and I must say that this is the most promising development for a long time.

Let's see if Carl and RMA will make it to deliver on this. Which, still needs to be proofed but I'm not going to stop to push for it.

Some notes:
- We will have an NDA
- Carl didn't lost interest, he is full comitted to R3. His contract work is (still) / was very intense. Things get a bit more relaxed there now.

- I / RMA will be the main communication channel. I have access to Rebol-3 twitter and there exists a RMA twitter.- We will continue to work on the R3-GUI and release it as we did before (sometimes there might be longer periods of no-release, if we are doing massive changes)- The main focus will be: fixing bugs, defining and writing down how datatypes are handled WRT conversion, priority, sorting etc."

(Robert Muench)

-Nicolas

Cht'i RUG 2011 in France

2011-05-29T13:22:00.001-07:00

A Rebol and Red Users Group took place in Lille, north of France : Cht'i RUG 2011.

DocKimbel presenting Cheyenne REBOL web server

During this event DocKimbel has presented his REBOL Web server called Cheyenne.

And of course, his new project called Red : a new programming language.

-Nicolas

ReBorCon 2011 : quick report

2011-03-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

The Rebol & Boron Conference took place in the Netherlands the 26th of february.

Official site :

http://reborcon.esperconsultancy.nl/

During the conference, the most important things was the announce of new project of DocKimbel : Red language creation.

More information about Red later.

Here comes the video :

Video of the Boron and OpenGL :

Video of the presentation of Cheyenne :

Video of the presentation of Cheyenne's RSP :

Video of the presentation of Red language :

-Nicolas

ReBorCon 2011

2011-02-12T08:05:00.000-08:00

REBOL & Boron Programming Language Conference

Date and Time
Saturday, 26 February 2011
11:00 - 16:00 hrs
Afterwards we will go for a drink and dinner in a local restaurant. If there is interest, we can arrange an extended programme for foreign visitors the Sunday after.

Programme
REBOL is an innovative programming language, especially suitable for Domain Specific Languages, Internet programming and semantic messaging. Boron is an open source language in the same family, a dialect of REBOL.
Presentations
- The new REBOL 3 Graphical User Interface under development
- REBOL 3 extensions: a binding with the cURL networking library
- Two commercial applications written in REBOL 3
- Introduction of a new Syllable Desktop live CD with REBOL 3 and Boron
- Cheyenne: a professional web server written in REBOL 2
- An OpenGL 3D demo in Boron
- Announcement of a new project
The time schedule will become available later on. Keep an eye on this web site.

Please visit conference site for more informations :

http://reborcon.esperconsultancy.nl/

Period ending 1-Feb-2011

2011-02-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

REBOL.org

its been a busy january on REBOL org, with 18 new or updated scripts by a few prolific posters
Recent changes on rebol.org

R3 news

Carl re-appears after a 3 month hiatus
ALIAS function removed in the next R3 version;
curecode reviewed by Carl, many bug fixes expected in A111 release.
Also, curecode got a new project for R3GUI.

R3GUI

New RMA release of R3GUI is available on:

the full source version + docs
the 'classic' one file release

Feel free to try it and let us know in the R3GUI Altme group. Any feedback is appreciated.

NOTE: this version is compatible only with the RMA version of Rebol3. You can get it here

Release change notes:

show-native recursive issue fixed
enhancements to TEXT-LIST, TEXT-TABLE, TAB-BOX styles
fixed DO reactor call
fixed reactor actions handling
optimized INIT-PANEL function
added FOREACH-FACE function
fixed internals of triggers subsystem
optimized DRAW blocks handling
optimized DO-STYLE and DO-TRIGGERS code
added triggers handling to set/insert-panel-content
lists.r3 code cleanup
cleanup of unused/leaked variables

R3 cURL binding documentation!

This is a big deal, it means we can build standards compliant internet aware R3 applications ... right now!

Kaj de Vos:
It took a lot more time than I expected to create the documentation for the cURL binding; about as long as the binding itself. But here it is, together with the documentation for the example extension:

R3 cURL documentation

The binding is now officially released

R3 ODBC extension

Christian Ensel writes on Altme:

I've updated the R3 ODBC extension to R3A110, get it here
This is the first version which works with date values.

GLASS

Release 003 is here: glass-r003.zip
main changes:

Editor style and associated text editor application
Encap friendly single file version of ALL glass libs, usable just like if they where external files.
The encap version of glass is all packaged within its own .zip file inside the root of the distro, to make it easier to get started.
New Image style, it also has a pretty cool image style demo app.
quite a few nuts and bolts worked on here and there.
reworked the folder structure a bit to make it cleaner (it shouldn't change much from now on), tell me what you think?
Added original SVG files used to create icons as part of distribution
Added a few reference glass-related images for demos and tutorials.
Windows title handling is now automatic when you fill their labels. (shown in text editor)
Many libs have had their APIs improved.
Extensive HISTORY AND RELEASE NOTES in docs folder.
Screenshots: image style tutorial, RED - REBOL text editor

Please try it out and give some feedback here or on the GLASS group on REBOL3 Altme world. It's still R2 based.

Also, GLASS now has a very simple installer which will be updated at each release.

just:

    do http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/glass-installer.r

its a command line script, but uses a file requestor so you can setup where glass is downloaded and unpacked.

Syllable OS

Kaj de Vos writes on Altme:

This past Saturday we held our Winter Syllable Conference: web.syllable.org
We introduced and handed out a sneak preview of our new Syllable Desktop live CD, introduced the REBOL 3 cURL binding
and went through our planned demonstration of setting up a website provider on Syllable Server, running on Cheyenne,
making a website on Desktop with my REBOL CMS, building it with REBOL 3 and uploading it to Server with the cURL binding,
with a short demo of the graphical version of Syllable Server thrown in

Period ending 21-jan-2011

2011-01-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

RMA R3 GUI

New RMA release of R3GUI is available on:

http://www.rm-asset.com/code/downloads/files/r3-gui-src.zip - this is the full source version + docs

http://www.rm-asset.com/code/downloads/files/r3-gui.r3.zip - this is the 'classic' one file release

Feel free to try it and let us know in the R3GUI Altme group. Any feedback is appreciated.

NOTE: this version is compatible only with the RMA version of Rebol3. You can get it from: http://www.rm-asset.com/code/downloads/files/rma-r3-build.zip

Release change notes:

- added missing images to docs (thanks to Pekr)
- UNVIEW now works like in R2
- removed STYLE/FACED, now it is obsolete (use only STYLE/FACETS)
- improvements to facets creation
- fixed box-model border caclulation
- fixed binding of actors
- DO-STYLE code optimalization and fixes
- VIEW function cleanup, now it should work on block of faces as well
- fixed panel(container) names binding
- fixed 'load trigger calling
- fixed WHEN style
- misc smaller fixes
- old unused code cleanup

Glass
From Maxim :
This is probably the biggest announcement I've ever done, I've got a little tear in my eye ;-)

GLASS IS HERE!!!

http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/glass-r002.zip

Beer 2 released
Message from Graham:
I've uploaded beer2 to here just now in case I haven't done this before:

http://beer2.s3.amazonaws.com/beer2.tar

Jaime Vargas said:

"The license can be changed to BSD with attributions to the following people:

Jaime Vargas
Ladislav Mecir
Richard Smolak
Irfan Jamil
Monah Baki"

in an email to me 28/1/2010"

Facebook Hacker Cup 2011

From Facebook REBOL group MaxV:

Facebook relesed its “Hacker Cup Competition”, but it didn’t include Rebol language. However you may test your skills on Rebol Forum:
http://synapse-ehr.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?3-Rebol
Will Rebol be shorter or more efficient than other language?

End of Cave mode ? ;)

After release of REBOL View 2.7.8, Carl's has published 2 items on his blog :

Quick Tour of Useful 2.7.8 Features

http://www.rebol.com/article/0505.html

Introducing the SPEED? Function (PRELIMINARY)

http://www.rebol.com/article/0506.html

There's also an item about rebol.net and the mailing list :

http://www.rebol.com/article/0504.html

From Carl :

"And, while I'm on the topic, there's the old issue of the REBOL email list. Can we retire that old server... which has been limping along for many years, and the list has not been very active. The user community has moved most messaging to other methods, such as AltME, etc.

So, what's the general opinion of users regarding the email list? Time to retire it?
"

So what the people of the community think about that ?
Please feel free to send your opinion on Carl's blog, on Twitter Rebol Week or on gmail for Rebol Week...

Merchants' Village, Bingo, BJs Training ... any others?

Merchants' Village is now running on it's own and growing well, with more than 50,000 square feet rented to vendors. More than 12,000 sales transactions have been processed by REBOL so far :)

My fiance Corina decided to start a weekly bingo event at Merchants' Village. Commercial bingo boards cost $thousands, but aren't big enough to handle the size space she needed, so I wrote her a little REBOL bingo app (took less than an hour). We bought a 180" screen for $166 and use an inexpensive projector to handle the whole event: http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=bingo.r

For her day job, Corina manages Human Resources for 15 BJ's stores, and this week began using her Jeopardy program at http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=jeopardy.r to run training sessions in a fun way - the employees and her field support managers love it!

REBOL runs so many business operations in and around my life, and the solutions have always been so quick and easy to create :) Please feel free to share your stories about REBOL in corporate America (and elsewhere) too!

posted by: Nick 12-Jan-2011/16:44:14-8:00

From Nick's forum

-Nicolas

Period ending 14-jan-2011

2011-01-15T02:10:00.000-08:00

Most influencing programmers
Our Carl, Carl Sassenrath, creator of REBOL is rank 13 of "Most influencing programmers"

http://www.hyenalabs.com/?p=717

The creators or main contributors of PERL, Visal Basic, C++ and even Python are behind Carl !

Facebook Hacker Cup 2011
Message from REBOL Facebook group, Maximiliano

Dear Rebels,

During these days there is the Facebook Hacker Cup 2011, and Rebol isn't in the possible programming language admitted.
Why don't you show that Rebol is an excellent language? Below there is the first puzzle to solve, try to post your solution.

Qualification round 1

Qualification round 2

Qualification round 3

Ynot script

A new scripting language that runs on JVM that could have been inspired by REBOL but in fact not.

Site of Ynot script

Very interesting. REBOL community must take a lesson of marketing.

ROTY 2010... the details...
Nominees:
Robert Muench
Nenad Rakocevic
Nick Antonaccio
Henrik Kristensen
Sunanda
Brian Hawley

Results:
Nick Antonaccio 3 votes
Nenad Rakocevic 3 votes
Sunanda 2 votes
Henrik Kristensen 2 votes
Brian Hawley 1 vote
Robert Muench 1 vote

Ballots
Votes cast by 12 people: [nve, BrianH, Dockimbel, Robert, Gregg, james_nak, Sunanda, PeterWood, DideC, PatrickP61, Maxim, btiffin]

Congrats to Nick and Nenad !

The Rebol Week needs YOU !

Yes, you can contribute to Rebol Week by sending us testimonies, articles, news related to REBOL.

You can send us feedback over AltME or by email

rebolweek at g m a i l dot c o m

REBOL IDE for beginners

Maximiliano have created a REBOL IDE for beginner.
Take a look at rebol.org

http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=rebolide.r

Great work Max !

And don't forget REBOL Facebook group...

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=99459740077

And don't forget to follow us on twitter ! ! ! ;)
http://twitter.com/rebolweek

-Nicolas

ROTY 2010... A the winner is...

2011-01-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

Message from Maxim:

Nick Antonaccio and Nenad Rakocevic have both been voted in as the
2010 rebol Of The Year.

Congrats to all nominees and of course to the Winners !

Nick has done a great job with his tutorials and his merchant Village
Nenad has done a great job with Cheyenne and his Softinnov products

-Nicolas

Period ending 7-jan-2011

2011-01-07T15:08:00.000-08:00

R2 reaches 2.7.8

New year and new release for REBOL R2. Not official on rebol.com but you can download Core and View version.

Go to download section of rebol.com

Waiting for the official fix log.

How big is the active REBOL community ?

One metric is the number of people posting to the public groups on the flagship AltME world, REBOL3:

In 2010, 105 people posted over 35,000 public messages.
http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-stats.r?world=r3wp&year=2010

That's pretty consistent with previous years too

sunanda

Help wanted to contribute to Rebol Week !

We have writters for this blog but we need young blood :)
I doesn't take necessary a lots of time... Feel free to contribute.
Appointment on Altme R3 world - group rebolweek

REBOL needs YOU !

R3/GUI

New RMA release of R3GUI is available on:

http://www.rm-asset.com/code/downloads/files/r3-gui-src.zip - this is the full source version + docs

http://www.rm-asset.com/code/downloads/files/r3-gui.r3.zip - this is the 'classic' one file release

Feel free to try it and let us know in the R3GUI Altme group. Any feedback is appreciated.

NOTE: this version is compatible only with the RMA version of Rebol3. You can get it from: http://www.rm-asset.com/code/downloads/files/rma-r3-build.zip

-Nicolas

Happy new year 2011

2011-01-01T07:35:00.001-08:00

Team of the Rebol Week wish you a happy new year !

May the year 2011 be the Rebol's year !

Happy REBOL 2011 !

-Nicolas

roty 2010

2010-12-22T21:45:00.000-08:00

2010 user.r rebol Of The Year

Voting in progress

Voting for the 2010 rebol Of The Year is in progress on the Altme world REBOL3.

And the nominees are:

Robert Muench

Nenad Rakocevic

Nick Antonaccio

Henrik Kristensen

Sunanda

Brian Hawley

Congratulations to all those on that esteemed list. Well done gentlemen, and Thank You.

Voting is scheduled to be held from Dec 15th through Dec 31st, 2010. Rumour is, that it may be extended

Get into Altme REBOL3 and see the user.r Chat and user.r Formal groups to participate.

Cheers from user.r

Merry Christmas 2010

2010-12-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

The Rebol Week team wish you a merry Christmas !

The team takes some days off in order to start 2011 with lots of enthousiasm and energy.

Don't forget REBOL :
small but robust !
with REBOL there's always a solution for that !

"Big Business Running On Rebol" the details

A very good story for Christmas...
Nick has detailled his Rebol application for his Merchants village...
He puts some screenshots.

And don't forget Rebol's book... ;)

-Nicolas

Period ending 17-dec-2010

2010-12-08T14:39:00.001-08:00

"Big Business Running On REBOL"

Nick has posted a very interesting news on rebolforum.
He has made all the IT in REBOL for his merchant village.

Here comes the story

Kaj's CMS ported to Syllabe Desktop

Kaj has ported his CMS to REBOL 3.
It runs on both REBOL 3 and REBOL 2 now, with a set of compatibility functions.
It's around 130 KB, approaching 4000 lines, and it builds websites around 35% faster than R2
The Unicode support has nicely fixed a few problems in Syllabe for the Russian version. Of course it would be more interesting if he releases the source ...

OSNews talks about the port.

TGD Consulting

Have you seen the products from this German company ?
They look very nice. Especially the visual webserver log viewer.
They also have a Webserver with VID management interface.

You can find all the products on this page

Graphics : OpenGL, R3 GUI

The R3GUI team continue to make progress on the GUI. On AltME, check the !REBOL3 GUI group.

Here is a preview...

Official distribution point announced by Robert for REBOL 3's GUI: here

-Nicolas

Period ending 10-dec-2010

2010-11-27T04:54:00.000-08:00

Don't forget your letter to Santa Claus !

A new release of R2, see the Change Logs page.
A official release of R3, and not alpha or beta release.
A wake-up of the community as relayed in the preceding Rebol Week edition.
A marketing team to promote Rebol.
A developper team to help Carl in the developpement of REBOL.
A better communication inside and outside the community...

May Santa Claus grant all my wish...

Idea of gift for Christmas

Little chauvinisme, but don't forget the book written by Peter Wood and Olivier Auverlot.

And for french speaking people, the original...

Tile the end of december, there's 20% of discount for the french version !

You can buy them on lulu.com

Excel dialect

As suggested by Reichart on AltME, let's discover the Excel dialect written by Robert Muench' & Gregg Irwin's.
Here comes the documentation.

Carl at Amiwest

Carl was at the AmiWest at the end of october.
He clean his basement and sell some Commodore suff : Amiga prototypes, etc.
He show a Amiga based version of R3 and talk about REBOL.

Link to the video : Carl's talk about R3
Don't forget part 1 of Carl's talk Link

-Nicolas 11-dec-10: correct link to part 1, thx rebtut

New home for Rebol.wik.is

On Rebol.wik.is losing its home, we have to find a new free hosting.
Maybe wikispaces ?

See U on AltME to discuss about solutions...

R3 alpha host-kit on GitHub

Host-Kit is now on GitHub. Carl made a little documentation about GIT.
Page can be found here.

-Nicolas

Period ending 3-Dec-2010

2010-11-25T02:49:00.000-08:00

GoogleVoice

Graham released a small VID app to send SMS using Googlevoice in August.
Get it while the site is still up.

Rebol.wik.is going down ...

Mindtouch are removing their free hosting so this site is going down on the 1st Jan 2011.
Not sure where if anywhere it will be moved to.

REBOL.net is down
Since the week-end of thanksgiving, rebol.net is not avaible. It was maybe turkey powered ;-)
RebolTechnology is on the problem since 1st december 2010.
Follows the item on Carl's blog here.

Update 3-dec : rebol.net is now available

REBOL Community wake up !

Community is important for a language.
The REBOL community is small but must show it's power : small but robust.
So Wake Up Reboler !
Help is required for :
- marketing solutions to promote REBOL,
- R3 implementation of professional database access like Oracle, Sybase,
- cleaning web sites with dead link : it is important to show good sites, even if there is few sites, than a index with a lot of websites with dead links.
- professional testimonies
- worldwide section with local support
- REBOL IDE !

REBOL resources

Here is a little usefull script on rebol.org.
Either you are on Windows, Linux or MacOS, you can download all important programs and scripts for REBOL.

Block builder

A tiny text based CMS written in REBOL. Less than 10 Kb program.
Article from reboltutorial on Dzone here.
Home page of the site :

http://reboltester.altervista.org/index.html

Vote for 2010's ROTY

Vote on AltME for 2010's ROTY.
See you on user.r sections of AltME world Rebol3.

-Nicolas

Period ending 26-Nov-2010

2010-11-25T01:10:00.000-08:00

French webzine talks about Carl and REBOL 3

2 French programming sites announce REBOL 3 alpha:

Developez.com
Programmez.com

And one IT webzine talks about Carl
and his project around REBOL 3 :

silicon.fr

It is infrequent to have such news on the French board. So spread it on the web !

LDAP protocol released !

Softinnov has released a first version of his LDAP protocol.
This protocol was long-awaited in the professional world.
Thank a lot to the french company Softinnov (also author of Cheyenne webserver, MySQL and PostgresQL driver).
You can find the protocol on softinnov.org here
Try it with your LDAP.

Cheyenne 0.9.20 released

The REBOL webserver Cheyenne has reached the 0.9.20 version at the end of October.
There are a lot of fixes for this version.
For complete information, please visit the Cheyenne blog :

http://cheyenne-server.org/blog.rsp

Some cool Cheyenne "Powered by" banners have also been made.
Please feel to grab them here and put them on your Cheyenne powered web site !
as Carl did it rebol.com

R3 on Amiga

Carl built a R3 release for Amiga (A109) for AmiWest.
You can read more news on all the Amiga's webzines.
And here is the article on Carl's blog :

http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0345.html

Webservice protocol needed

Writing your own protocol in REBOL is a powerfull feature of REBOL.
In R2, we have internet based protocols like http:// pop:// dns:// ...
Softinnov writes protocols for MySQL mysql:// PosGresQL LDAP ldap:// ...
But what about webservices ?
REBOL needs to talk with other systems.
Webservice is a solution : Calling a webservice but also expose a REBOL program as a Webservice.
We need some volunteers to write tutorials and protocols around REBOL and Webservices.
Put your script and tutorial on rebol.org

Try REBOL3 - Updated with A110

Kaj has updated his Try REBOL3.
in browser site with the last alpha release of REBOL : A110.
Try to promote this site and make it popular !

Syllabe and R3

"The latest version of the REBOL 3 open host kit, alpha 110, enables Syllable Desktop for the first time to run the REBOL 3 client/server RebDev collaboration application for chat and development files sharing"

See the complete article here.

-Nicolas

Period ending 25-Sep-2010

2010-09-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

REBOL2 JIT Compiler bitchfest fallout

Cyphre reports that this has been closed to private testing only, and a public release will now only happen at the RC1 stage. Contact him directly on the Rebol3 world if you wish to join the private beta testing group.

Hostkit Madness

Carl has been making frenzied releases of the hostkit, and we are now up to a release of 107. There is a 108 not released to the public yet. He has even built a R3 107? core for Amiga OS4.1. Don't even ask why!

Try REBOL3

Kaj has updated his Try REBOL3 in browser site. You can execute the Rebol expression in Rebol2, Rebol3 and in Boron. Eg, try this "make string! 1000'000'000" and see what happens in each.

More S3 tools

Check out Chris' REBOL tools page where he has taken the S3 work and built a protocol from it. He even has a fledging rest:// protocol, and ... a twitter client which uses OAuth. Chris has also promised a GUI for the latter ... but apparently his footie is keeping him busy.

Boron

Ever the subversive, Kaj also did a talk in Holland for the software freedom day on Boron, a language inspired by Rebol. See the slides in english/boron.

Stackoverflow

Got a programming question on Rebol? Fork wants you to post it to SO so that it will appear that Rebol is not quite dead. You might even get an answer!

Rebol without a clue?

I think this refers to the author of this blog who hasn't been following the Rebol3 development cycle. But I suspect that perhaps the disorganization that is the Rebol.com site also plays a part in not presenting a clear message. Still, there is an interesting lengthy comment from Henrik who explains some of the inner circle (codename = "IC") happenings.

R3GUI

This seems to be the current codename for the GUI which is being developed by RM Asset. Those of us outside the IC see what appears to be a chaotic process but we are being assured that all the pieces will fall into place. Pekr remarked that it looks as though we are even less far along as Carl's VID .. but try it for yourself.

Period ending 17-July-2010

2010-07-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2009 rebol Of The Year

2010-02-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

2009 user.r rebol Of The Year

Brian Hawley

Brian Hawley has been voted the second recipient of the user.r rebol Of The Year award. Brian is always busy supporting the REBOL community and a vote on Altme world REBOL 3 led to this proud presentation.

We all wish to congratulate Brian and to thank him for his many contributions to REBOL releases. user.r is proud to present the second annual roty to our good Mr. Hawley. Congratulations to our 2009 rebol Of The Year.

We'd also like to thank Ashley Trüter of Dobeash Software, roty 2008 for past and present contributions.

And thanks to the other 2009 nominees, Nenad and Henrik, their efforts being greatly appreciated.

Cheers from the REBOL Week crew. It's going to be another good year.

In February

2010-02-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

RebDB 3

Dobeash meets REBOL/3

Just yay.

To try Ashley Trüter's shiny new take on databasing:

From an r3 console (tested under a96)

import http://idisk.me.com/dobeash/Public/rebdb.r
help db-
test: db-load http://idisk.me.com/dobeash/Public/test.bin
help test
sql select test

More soon. Docs pending ... and Dobeash does docs

Just yay.

REBOL Technologies

Alpha 97

A97 released, with the announcement at http://www.rebol.com/r3/changes.html which will eventually be archived through docs/changes.html

Feeling the love.

In the Wild

BrianH

A link to some handy 2.7.8 source code tidbits via rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r thanks to our good Brian, nominee in the 2009 rebol Of The Year awards and all round REBOL heavy lifter.

Short week

Cheers from the Rebol Week crew

P.S.

Thanks to our good Graham, The Rebol Week has been going for four years now.

Week Ending 31-Jan-2010

2010-01-30T22:00:00.000-08:00

Communication Breakdown

Only this blog posting to explain his absence ...

Power Mezzanines

Gabriele has released his power mezzanine pack licensed under the MIT license. Lots of good stuff here .. and he has a mercurial repository at Sourceforge. It appears the licence is owned by Qtask.

BEER 2

Jaime Vargas has agreed to relicense BEER from GPL to BSD. A download link will be available soon.

RebBBS

Graham has written a small BBS loosely based on RebelBB. It was written to test some Amazon functions and uses S3 to store messages as JSON objects, and Amazon SDB to store the user data and message index. The early documentation is here.

Week Ending 24-Jan-2010

2010-01-26T14:59:00.001-08:00

Communication Breakdown

Well, not Led Zeppelin, but seems Carl has disappeared into his cave again apparently spending all his time on redoing the rebol.com website. Meanwhile developers are chomping at the bit (terrible pun) for bugs to be fixed. What we need is a hero as depicted here but can Carl really do everything by himself? The R3 chat system, his own source code repository, and now the website redesign seems just another distraction as though he does not want to finish R3.

Altme

A long awaited upgrade took place ... and now you can no longer lose messages. Instead you get to stare at a blocking gray box ...

On the bright side, you can now set all the posts as "read" so that they are no longer "red".

Schemes

On the network schemes side, Graham ( yes, speaking of myself in the 3rd person ), has created a new fax:// scheme to interact with hylaFAX, and also a imap4 protocol. Since he doesn't use Imap, it would be nice if someone tested these schemes out.

There's also some initial work done on using Amazon SDB which seem to work.

Week Ending 16-Jan-2010

2010-01-15T19:33:00.000-08:00

New Schemes - WIP

More progress has made so that we now have partially working dns://, daytime://, pop3://, smtp://, ftp://, and as a present fax:// ! This last protocol allows a user to communicate with a HylaFAX server.

Here is a rudimentary R3 GUI script using the fax:// protocol Sendfax.r

All of this is a work in progress of course, and we do need some guidance from RT so that the schemes are consistent.

ARM??

Carl has agreed to port R3 to ARM. The new plug computers use the Marvell ARM processors, and will make great REBOL appliances. The latest Plug 3 announced at CES 2010 this month have a sleek sexy form. And of course there's some talk of Android also running on ARM processors ... so this gives the expression REBOL in your face a whole new meaning!

REBOL web forum

Reboltalk has been down for months. I have started a new forum to replace it using vbulletin. You can sign up here.

R3 Extensions

Jocko has posted some sample extensions at his site. These include TTS using COM and a MatLab extension.

Week Ending 10-Jan-2010

2010-01-09T15:23:00.000-08:00

REBOL 3

New Schemes - WIP

Some users have decided to make start on some network schemes for R3. I expect they will eventually be re-written to conform to a consistent style and functionality.

A few can be found http://rebol.wik.is/Rebol3/Schemes

New old console

The current R3 alpha console in windows is very painful to work with. Carl on request has agreed to at least restore the console functionality from that of REBOL2.

Documentation

Although documentation is partly a community burden, the lower level documentation for words where there is no source still lies with RT. Carl has agreed to restart the lower level documentation for the wiki,

Ps: Altme has apparently been updated for the first time in 1.7 years.

Year ending 2009

2009-12-29T12:21:00.000-08:00

REBOL 3

Freeing of REBOL/Command

Carl has decided to free up SSL, encryption ports, ODBC etc with the release of version of Rebol/View that no longer requires a license for these features to work. A 2.7.7 build has been released for testing. I can not disclose the download site .. but if you hop onto qtask or Rebol3 altme world .. you'll see it.

Rebol 2.7.7

And redevelopment has started on Rebol2 with a 2.7.7 release by years end ... with a view to fixing a few bugs ... perhaps in the installer, a memory leak in view ( which was reported by yours truly 5 years ago ), some VID fixes and any other low hanging fruit. The idea is to start monthly releases similar to the Rebol3 release schedule.

PS: http://www.rebol.com/downloads/v277/rebview.exe
1 Jan 2010: Windows only so far.

Cheyenne and Web Sockets

Dockimbel has updated Cheyenne to include limited support for web sockets. Checkout the SVN

Week of Mid December

2009-12-15T20:43:00.000-08:00

REBOL 3

Host Kits

Alpha release of GNU/Linux POSIX Host Kits announcement.

It's been a long, exciting, long wait. Woohoo! Alpha 96, a fine vintage.

Good initial reviews

From what I've come to understand, Kaj had a Syllable Desktop version of the host kit compiled and alpha running, not many minutes after the announcements. A decade of patient planning and I think I could see the grin beams in the chat post.

Let me in

Snag a copy of REBOL 3 alpha, chat.

Short post excuses

A short post for a big week, mainly a verbose web link republish, but it had to be said.

Cheers from The Rebol Week crew.

In November

2009-11-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

REBOL Release 3

A94, the core edges start to smooth

REBOL release 3 continues apace. A fast pace. Yet a pace surrounded in a surreal cycle of molasses slowed temporal warp of expectations, flashes of brilliance and the coming downs. Mostly good and, as far as I see it, any negative feelings are brought on by wants. All in all, this can only be seen as a good thing. Most wants can and will be filled, and the longer it soaks, the cleaner the final REBOL 3 solution will be. I can't speak to other platforms, but the r3-a9x series of Debian GNU/Linux binaries are becoming more and more fun to use. The little things we rebols take for granted in R2 are starting to feel right again. With the bonus of the new programming language as a communications channel, (code slung together while chatting, browsing and chasing technical support) paradigm that is emerging. A nicer human machine interface. And this is without view.

Excuse the use of the term programming language, we all know REBOL is far more than a language...

Don't forget to type upgrade. For the last three months, Rebol Technologies has been posting an average of 1.5 new releases a week.

Recent updates

stdio fixes
parse evolves. Someone could and should write a book on this one.
Unicode improves
the wiki is updated just about everyday.
so much more

In the Wild

REBOL Driven

You have to check out tryrebol!! Yes, those are exclamation marks.
This is frickin awesome!

REBOL in a website.

Hosted on a very REBOL friendly operating system, Syllable, with a REBOL web server, Cheyenne, and QuarterMaster, the REBOL web application framework, all together and running a web REBOL console with public access to testing expressions. Sweet!

Well done.

Some kudos

Name dropping

Janko
Pekr
Robert
Steeve

Why? Rising stars, old hands and all deserving of more credit for contributions. Thanks gentlemen.

Cheers from the Rebol Week crew.

Late in October

2009-10-22T21:57:00.000-07:00

REBOL Release 3

Closing in...?

The alpha releases are approaching centenarian status. This seems like a good thing. A lot of refinements, revisions and REBOL. This seems like a bad thing well, not bad bad, funny bad, as we want REBOL/3 and we want it bad.

Activity

Things are happening both on the core front and the community front. For example, our good Christopher Ross-Gill is hard at it with XML handlers for R3. xml_rebol. Carl is just hard at it. Perhaps he wants it bad too.

Some kudos

user.r

The 2009 rebol Of The Year awards will be a contest. Three names currently stand nominated. Nenad Rakocevic (DocKimbel's alias), Brian Hawley and Henrik Mikael Kristensen. As it is with this kind of thing, they all deserve the nod, but may the best rebol win.

Details as they progress will mainly be on the Altme REBOL3 world in the user.r Formal channel.

In the Wild

REBOL gets some coverage at Stackoverflow: a nice collection of technical questions and answers:
stackoverflow.com

Meanwhile

REBOL release 2 seems to be slowly but surely increasing its user base. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but it just seems that REBOL is showing up in more threads of the World Wide Web. Or is it the rose coloured googles?

Cheers from the Rebol Week crew.

Late in August update

2009-08-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

REBOL Release 3

EXTENSIONS!

Be sure to check out the buzz around (what were REBOL plugins, now with REBOL flair) Extensions.
For Release A77 and up, Concepts: Extensions

R3 in the wild

Our good Maxim Olivier-Adlhoch (after three times fast, Mad Max is easier ;) ) has already posted images from his experiments that extend REBOL 3 into OpenGL for hardware accelerated graphics. See altme archive for a link to the image and the surrounding conversation.

That's it. Extensions. REBOL 3 yells Hello World.

Cheers from the Rebol Week crew.
Psst, words of BETA have started to float in the blogosphere.

Carl's influence recognized

2009-08-03T12:48:00.000-07:00

Carl Sassenrath included in (a blogger's) Top 30 Influential list

Around the Net and back again

It might not be a Turing; but for us fans, it's nice to see Carl get some notice. Our good Sunanda, the humble nice guy behind almost all the great things at (the newly upgraded) rebol.org resource, noticed this one:

www.webdesigndev.com/programming/30-most-influential-people-in-programming

Cheers from the REBOL Week crew

A quick REBOL update, July 2009

2009-07-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

REBOL Release 3

Excuses

It was a long week, since April, delays due to rain

R3 News

Following along from the July roadmap, it seems that the first entry in the plan, plugins, has Carl deep into it, and a little quieter than we have had the privilege to get used to of late.

Tweets

Carl now posts quips regarding REBOL 3 developments at rebol3

REBOL 3 Very exciting times indeed

In the Wild

If you haven't lately, do yourself a favour and refresh your "Doc". DocKimbel of Softinnov is still up to old and new tricks and donating copiously to the REBOL codescape. Cheyenne, Thee REBOL web server, source code snapshots, are now available using Subversion, with

svn checkout http://cheyenne-server.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cheyenne-server-read-only

We really do owe Doc and the other REBOL superstars a nice big round of applause.

Excuses

There is so much more ...

guru Ladislav spotted

Ashley and RebGUI and OS/X native requestors

New people in Altme rebol3 world

Qtask

but it is still raining, details delayed

Cheers once again from the REBOL Week crew.

REBOL 3 news and other sundries. April 2009

2009-04-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

REBOL Release 3

R3 really heats up

If you haven't been following the progress, you may be missing out. Recent developments include:

GNU/Linux versions of the alpha releases. R3 alpha Releases

DECODE and ENCODE functions. CODECs for PNG, GIF, BMP and JPEG included so far

New Documentation wiki. REBOL 3 Documentation or type docs from a console

A whole new REBOL chat environment. Just type chat from an alpha console

Bug tracker accessible by typing bugs from the console

Modules are getting a good duff over. R3 Modules

... so much more

REBOL Release 3 is FOR us, and it is partly reliant ON us. Opening up development for community involvement comes with some level of risk. REBOL developers will have to show that putting REBOL at that risk is worthwhile and become involved in productive and effective ways.

The alpha releases await your testing, input and betterments.
Dig in. The water is fine and getting better by the minute.

In the wild

REBOL Rock'n'Roll

Nick Antonaccio rocks out REBOL!
Ode to REBOL mp3

REBOL chats pass 100,000

The rebol.org archives of Altme traffic have surpassed 100,000 entries. There is a lot of life packed into the REBOL3 Altme world.

Cheers once again from the REBOL Week crew.

2008 user.r rebol Of The Year

2009-01-01T23:27:00.000-08:00

2008 user.r rebol Of The Year

Ashley Trüter

Ashley Trüter of Dobeash Software has been named the first recipient of the user.r rebol Of The Year award.

Ashley's consistently kind professionalism is a testament to the REBOL way.

We all wish to congratulate Ashley and to thank him for his immeasurable contributions to REBOL development. user.r is proud to present the first annual roty to our good Mr. Trüter.

Cheers from the REBOL Week crew. It's going to be a good year.

Period ending 24th Dec 2008

2008-12-23T19:07:00.000-08:00

Henrik offering insights into the unreleased R3 GUI:

As far as I can tell there are animation effects in it as well as
a small suite of debug tools. Each source file is really small, around
2-8 kb with a few going above 10 kb. Fully commented and very clean

More information is available at
http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r?post=r3wp453x7314

SQLite Driver by Ashley 1.0.6 Update

Mac OS X now uses the v2 API and newer dylib path. SQLite/version now contains version number as a tuple!

It is now available at: http://www.dobeash.com/download.html

RebGUI build#117

Release notes here: http://www.dobeash.com/RebGUI/release.html#section-11

REBOL.org, October 2008: improved ways to look for scripts:

http://www.rebol.org/boiler.r?display=whats-new

Better script search abilities in REBOL.org:
http://www.rebol.org/boiler.r?display=introduction.html

It's never been easy finding out how to join any of the REBOL Altme worlds (such as REBOL3). You can see many theads on the Mailing List and REBOLtalk were newcomers are trying to find the way in.

Now the REBOL Library is trying to make it a little easier and obvious. The Library's Altme pages have a "join REBOL3 world" page that explains the process, and can accept requests (which are passed on to the REBOL3 Administrators):
http://www.rebol.org/aga-join.r

Chris < QM > Version 0.3.8

QuarterMaster (aka QM) is a REBOL web-based framework. Version 0.3.8 is now available.

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

Fixed some Cheyenne glitches, works now with .exe version (see QuickStart guide).

New experimental version 1.3 of MySQL driver

Doc "I've just upload a new experimental 1.3 version of MySQL driver supporting mutiple queries, stored procedures and multiple result sets. Reading mutiple results is done by calling COPY for each result.

Download at http://softinnov.org/tmp/mysql-protocol-41.r

New version 1.3 of new MySQL driver released as beta. (same URL).

Changes:

- Fixed the multiple result sets end-of-stream issue. Now an extra COPY will
return NONE, marking the end of the data stream.

- Fixed error message parsing for protocol 4.1.

- Added SQL request delimiter property to port/locals/delimiter (default: #";")

REBOL DevCon 2008 -- an e-only event

Nick confirms DevCon2008 -- an e-only event) for 27-dec-2008, 20:00 UTC:
http://rockfactory.us/events/devcon.cgi

REBOL - A Programmer's Guide (translated English version is now available)

Peter Wood is pleased to announce that the electronic version of "Rebol - A programmer's guide" is now available at http://www.lulu.com/content/5382304 priced at 15.99 Euros.

The printed version will be available within the next two to three weeks and will be priced at 25 Euros.

The book's introduction and table of contents can be freely downloaded from http://www.auverlot.fr/index.php?perma=1224333460

Peter Wood also says: The anglicised source code of the book "Rebol - A programmer's guide" can now be downloaded from the book's page at http://auverlot.fr/index.php?perma=1224333460

It is quite possible that I may have introduced the odd bug during their translation. If you find any please let me know.

Period ending 19th October 2008

2008-10-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

Chocolat is now Vanilla free!

Sabu Francis is renaming his Vanilla 0.6.3 release to Chocolat at the request of the original Vanilla authors. He will be setting up a website sometime when time permits to host the code.

HylaFAX web interface

Graham Chiu has released a light weight web interface to HylaFAX, the open source enterprise fax server software. It uses Cheyenne, and RSP pages. Internet Explorer users can view faxes in a REBOL plugin that allows them to rotate and ink on the fax. Chrome, and FF users will just see a PNG representation.

Cheyenne and mod-rest

Graham has been RESTing way too much of late and has persuaded dockimbel to help him create a mod-rest.r for Cheyenne! This is so that a REST interface can be coded to HylaFAX.

VIDinc

Well, we have no idea of what Carl is going to name his new baby. I favour god for graphical object dialect ... but I guess we don't want religion mixed with programming.

It is currently being alpha tested by Henrik and BH .. see this styles document. Henrik has posted lots of screenshots and a couple of movies.

REBOL not for me??

Carl has decided to refocus REBOL away from the ordinary programmer ... being dismayed at seeing so much REBOL code written in C or BASIC style. A few of us had a touch of self doubt reading this blog ... ahhh, who cares, as long as we enjoy what we are doing.

Slightly later in September 2008

2008-09-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

The web is the thing

Vanilla

Sabu Francis has modified Vanilla.

Vanilla is a REBOL implementation of Web Log and Wiki, potentially the first bliki system ever developed.

Sabu has released a version of Vanilla, labelled as 0.6.3 at sabufrancis.com.

A legacy contributor to the Vanilla system, Andreas Bolka, would like everyone to know that this is not an official release of the Vanilla system, originally by Chris Langreiter.

Sabu's software is based on the last release, 0.6.2, from 2004 and is documented as a modification in accordance with the Academic Free License version 2.0. This blogger is making this up, but perhaps this mod could be named Vanilla chocolate-chip. ;)

Regardless, Vanilla is a gem of REBOL software and can easily be installed along with an Apache webserver. Interest in ensuring this system works with the Cheyenne webserver means more news may be posted shortly.

For details of the newest, click to sabufrancis.com.

For general information on everything Vanilla and to see it in action, click to vanillasite.at.

Updated HTTP

Our good Graham Chui, flagship at Synapse Direct, has posted a link to an updated HTTP scheme for REBOL. Implements DELETE and PUT and adds the ability to send cookies, woohoo!, including with the GET verb.

See all this niceness at rebol.wik.is.

Samples of the simplicity.


REBOL []
URL: http://somesite.moc
read/custom URL [ put %file [ Cookie: "authtoken=foo" ]]
read/custom URL [ put "some text" ]
read/custom URL [ get "" [ Cookie: "authtoken=anotherfoo" ]]

As is becoming this author's favoured rebol rally, Go Graham Go!

Cheers from the REBOL Week crew

Later in September 2008

2008-09-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

Cheyenne

Cheyenne 0.9.19 Preview Release

Nenad has just published a link to the next Preview Release of the Cheyenne web server

Main changes are :

an improved PHP support (now works reliably)

sandboxed RSP webapps (as much as it's possible in R2)

now compatible with REBOL 2.7.6

bugfixes

See ChangeLog.txt file in the archive for complete description.

Support Cheyenne. Run a webserver. Go Doc Go!

Get the current zip from cheyenne-server.org.

Rebol Technologies

Name the GUI contest

Carl has given interested parties a chance to win a REBOL Release 3 T-Shirt. Perhaps the first ever R3 T.

See Name the GUI for complete details and a chance to offer up the winning name or acronym.

Cheers from the REBOL Week Team,
REBOL on, REBOL on.

Somewhen in September, 2008

2008-09-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

Syllable Server

In the "you scratch my back ..." department

This is a (reformatted for this blog ... mistakes may well be mine) reprint of a news release regarding Syllable Server. Many thanks to Kaj de Vos and the Syllable team. Syllable is now listed on the GNU/Linux distribution website, distrowatch/syllable. Well done and congratulations.

News Release

The third release of Syllable Server has been published. This is an
important release, because it is the first one that focused on making
the system actually usable as a server. A number of popular servers were added and configured, and also several innovative REBOL software stacks

Out of the imaginary box, Syllable Server is now ready for such things as accepting remote SSH log-ins over the network, running a web server on the Cheyenne cheyenne-server.org REBOL server, running an FTP server and several more.

Special attention has been paid to programmability, with support for developing Model-View-Controller web applications in QuarterMaster QuarterMaster and networking applications with the REBOL/Services REBOL/LNS Service Oriented Architecture.

The Genode genode.org Nitpicker windowing system is also included.

Read the rest in the full changelog. An extensive manual manual was also written, which is easy to follow.

As usual, both a BitTorrent download found here (preferred) and a regular download are available (80 MB 7-Zip archive). Please use the torrent if you can.

I hope you can do something useful with this, and if you do, please let us know, maybe through dropping by at http://syllable.org .

Cheers from the REBOL Week crew. With announcments like this, it's going to be another good week.

Midweek, September 10 2008

2008-09-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

rebol.org

Nice changes

Sunanda has been hard at it of late, smoothing out and enhancing the script repository and all the other nifty things at rebol.org.

The site now has prettier URLs. http://www.rebol.org/cpt-list-scripts.r?user-name=gabriele will now work, bypassing the older /cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/... naming convention.

News about changes to the Script popularity engine can be read from the mailing list archive in Sunanda's announcement To see the new statistics, visit script-popularity.r

In the Wild

DocKimbel announces a Windows printing system

rebols using Microsoft Windows(tm), now have access to REBOL application controlled printing.

Get an early copy of the code at Sofinnov.org

Nenad has stated that documentation is pending, and I hope I didn't betray his trust posting the temporary link here in the Week.

Note:This code requires the newest 2.7.6 REBOL release. It is a shiny example of what can be done with the now freed LOAD/LIBRARY feature.

And this indirectly traces back as to why Gabriele's name was used for the rebol.org URL announcement. Don't forget to check out the fantastic PDF Maker, with some documentation at pdf-maker-doc.pdf.
Gabriele did a wonderful job providing cross-platform print capabilities for REBOL developers a long time ago.

Both Nenad and Gabriele deserve a rousing round of rebol applause and revelry. That isn't really news, simply deserved.

RebDB

As mentioned in the Breaking News, don't forget to checkout the latest RebDB
at 2.0.3 release notes.

DocBase

Japanese

Translations of some REBOL documentation in Japanese have been spotted on the REBOL Docbase wiki. Index of Japanese Documents. Check for pages created by user Skoba. Thanks go to S. KOBAYASHI.

Rebol Technologies

RT in the cave

We still await technicals from the Rebol Technologies bat cave. Yes, we want to see more REBOL/3.

Yet, as can be seen from the above notes, REBOL/2 is alive, well and quite vibrant. On that issue, our good Brian Hawley, and others, are always pushing the flag toward a 2.7.7 release. Release date pending.

Cheers once again from The REBOL Week crew.

Breaking news from RebDB

2008-09-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

Major minor announcement

RebDB 2.0.3 announced with JOIN capabilities

Ashley Trüter of Dobeash Software just announced an update to the ever popular RebDB database management toolkit. Along with new string! input to the sql function, we also get colon argument replacements. Another new feature, and the big news is a new single table join facility. This facility also opens up a very nice list of values lookup enhancement.

Read the 2.0.3 release notes for more details.

Get the software (19K zip), to see for yourself.

Cheers from the REBOL Week crew. With news like this, it's going to be a good week.

Many days since March

2008-08-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

In the Wild

HTML Dialect

Henrik of HMK Design has published his work in progress for a wonderfully succinct dialect for generating HTML. See HTML Dialect for details.

TRETBASE

Paul Tretter has published an awesome REBOL database manager, TRETBASE

This engine allows a REBOL developer to create and manage databases using REBOL expressions with native REBOL data inputs and native REBOL result sets. This author finds it to be a very immersive development experience, very capable and very indicative of the power of the REBOL datatype model.

See the link to TRETBASE for downloads documentation and a Forum. Definitely one this author's favourite REBOL tools.

DocKimbel

NTLM

Nenad has updated the NTLM support library. See softinnov.org for details.

Cheyenne

The Cheyenne site has expanded, reorganized, and well, deserves a visit. Not just from the hardcore rebols, but anyone that wants a simplified and powerful web server system.

QuarterMaster

Christopher Ross-Gill has been hard at it extending the capabilities of QuarterMaster. QM is approaching a stage where this author feels that statements like Give Ruby on Rails a run for its money are not out of line.

Anton Rolls has published some documentation on a face options dialect.

Unrelated

Not that it has anything to do with us, but the cuil.com search engine has a pretty neat result page for a REBOL search.

Syllable

The Syllable Operating System continues it support of REBOL with REBOL, the Cheyenne Web Server and QuarterMaster framework included in the distributions.

rebol.org

Easier Script Submission

The rebol.org site has been updated by Sunanda. Contributing scripts has been simplified. Very few header fields are now mandatory, only:

Title:
Date:
File:

are now required. All other fields are optional. Along with this change, is free form script tagging. Contributed scripts now have more user generated meta data tags to assist us all in searching. Minutes after the announcement of the easier submission process, Nick Antonaccio posted up some 30 scripts. The script repository is fast approaching the 900 script mark.

REBOL Technologies

No news is good news?

We all long for more information from RT. REBOL 3 developments have gone to the bat cave and we eagerly await news and updates.

Lots happening

This RebolWeek post is weak on all the wonderful things that have happened in the REBOL world since the last entry was made.

For Instance; Brian Tiffin presented REBOL at the Ottawa Canada Linux User Group meeting on August 5th, 2008. OCLUG. At the same time, Brian met Brock. A face to face rebol meet up. Woohoo!

Cheers from The Rebol Week every few months or so crew.

Week ending March 24, 2008

2008-03-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-16T00:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-09T20:07:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-02T01:57:00.000-08:00

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.]

Special Notice

2008-01-08T15:42:00.000-08:00

Rebol3 alpha now open

The public release of Rebol3 alpha is now open, and pretty close to the date I predicted last year!

If you're not an expert Reboler, I suggest you leave this for now .. but otherwise, enjoy :)

The week ending 23 Dec 2007

2007-12-23T20:20:00.000-08:00

RebGUI (a lightweight alternative to VID)

Build#107 was released on Friday, Dec 21 by Ashley. It comes with a new tree widget.

USAGE:
tree data ["Pets" ["Cat" "Dog"] "Numbers" [1 2 3]]

DESCRIPTION:
Values arranged in a collapsible hierarchy.

OPTIONS:
'expand starts with all nodes expanded

"It's very basic, can only handle a couple hundred entries, and still has some UI quirks ... but it works and is only 3Kb." -- Ashley

Build#108 was released on Saturday, Dec 22 by Ashley.

1) Fixed UI quirks with tree widget

2) Renamed vid widget to style

3) Added a new scroll-panel widget

USAGE:
scroll-panel data [calendar]
scroll-panel data [field field]

DESCRIPTION:
A panel used to group widgets within a scrollable container.

4) Added a new sheet widget

USAGE:
sheet
sheet options [size 3x3 width 2]
sheet data [A1 1 A2 2 A3 "=A1 + A2"]

DESCRIPTION:
Simple spreadsheet, based on rebocalc.r, with formulas calculated left to right, top to bottom.
A cell is either a scalar value, string, or a formula starting with "=".
Scalar values are automatically right-justified, series values left-justified.
Remember to put spaces between each item in a formula and use () where needed.

OPTIONS:
'size specifies number of columns and rows
'width specifies cell width in relation to cell height

5) Updated %tour.r to incorporate examples of tree (List), scroll-panel (Grouping) and sheet (List) usage.

Cheyenne released with sqlite.

dockimbel,"Cheyenne v0.9.17 re-released. Now includes the source code for the %service.dll library. As a remainder, all the Cheyenne source code, including the service.dll source is release under BSD license."

NOTE: Cheyenne is a full-featured Apache-class web server implementation using 100% native REBOL.

Month ending Nov 12th

2007-11-13T17:30:00.000-08:00

R3 updates

On Monday version A82 was posted to the Alpha team.

New MOVE function to move a value or span of values in a series

New IN-DIR function that evaluates a block while in a directory

PRINT, MOLD, FORM allow any-type!

bug fixes

This seems like a long pause, but it is all due to ...

DevBase

A new Open Source REBOL source code management and collaboration tool has been published. The r3 alpha team is hard at work smoothing out the edges and this product will soon be released. DevBase was created to allow more community involvement in and to accelerate the pace of REBOL Release 3 development. Since it's release quite a few code submissions have been accepted by RT. Including the first Mezzanine function submissions, some of which are listed above as part of the A82 release.

This product will allow REBOL Technologies a little breathing room with REBOL development and will allow for smooth integration of the plethora of third party efforts expected to soon follow the release of REBOL version 3.

RSWF

David Oldes Olivia updates the REBOL/Flash dialect. This month has seen
versions 2.5.0 through 2.11.0.
A short list of what's new

New swf-parser included which replaces old exam-swf function (useful for importing foreign SWF files)

Added implementation of Class definitions for SWF versions 6 and higher

Added new 'trace function into actions (which can be use to compile swf files with or without trace calls easily)

'require and 'include now accepts block of files or urls

The main attraction is a wonderful layout engine.

For example:


background 200.200.200
require %tracer.rswf

layout [
    at 10x60
    across
    DateChooser 120
    Calendar     92
    DateChooser 162x265 2009-1-1
]

doAction [
    GUI_DateChooser.prototype.onSetDate: func[date][
        trace(this._name "onSetDate:" date)
    ]
    GUI_DateChooser.prototype.onChangeMonth: func[date][
        trace(this._name "newMonth:" date)
    ]
]
showFrame end

To see this in action, click to DateChooser

Henrik's Blog

Henrik of HMK Design continues to keep people in the REBOL Release 3 loop with some
insider looks at how things are shaping up. A nice example can be seen at
HMK Design.

rebol.org and altme archive

Sunanda has been hard at work building up the search engine for the Altme REBOL3 world
archive. Try it out at Altme Search or Altme Group Archive as Sunanda has coined it.

The altme groups archive at REBOL.org contains over 179,000 postings.
Including indexes: that's 22 meg of data making it about the same size as the Mailing List Archive database.

More info can be found at aga help

rebol.org submissions

Tom Conlin has added a binary search tool. See it at binary-search.r

Altme Updates

The windows version of the Alternate Messaging software, Altme, has had two recent
updates. These updates will happen automatically, but if you are not yet in the know,
downloads start at altme.com with information on the updates at the Altme New page.

Mailing List

As Sunanda points out:

The Mailing List, despite years of neglect has, this year, shown the first increase in traffic for over half a decade:

Of note on the Mailing List:

Speed comparison with Java. And an optimization challenge that has got the Community coding in R2 again. Part of that thread can be seen in the ML Archive. You may also want to check out ML Date Index.

Until next time

Enjoy

The month ending 5th October 2007

2007-10-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

REBOL3

The REBOL 3 alpha release is still MIA .. it seems the team now don't wish to release anything until it is complete. For those of us waiting on the side lines, the totally unrealistic time frames that were announced continues to wreak havoc on the community's spirit. Some official news and damage control from RT would be welcome. I am reminded that the first alphas of Rebol 1 nearly a decade ago were less functional than what I am led to believe the current alpha state is now.

MySQL

Dockimbel has updated his driver to version 1.2.0. The following changes were announced

Changed behaviour and syntax of the READ function.
Fix for parsing correctly quoted empty strings. (Fix by Oldes)
Fix for the driver loosing local flags, like 'flat, 'auto-ping?,... when reconnecting (thanks to Will Arp)
Fix a remanence issue on /flat and /raw flags in 'send-sql after automatic reconnection. (thanks to Will Arp)
Improved port recovery support after a failed request upon a shutdown server.
An init SQL string can now be specified for an opened port.

RebGUI

Ashley has updated RebGUI to add some new functionality to the radio-group which can now be reset to an unselected state, and the tab panel to allow tabless panels.

Source code colorizer

Oldes has released a color code script that color codes REBOL scripts without the recursion parse limits of Carl's original script. Here's an example.

REBOL/Flash dialect

Oldes also has updated this to version 2.0.0

Annabelle

Sabu Francis is writing a simple object-oriented M-V-C content management system called "Annabelle" (ACMS) written in Rebol and JQuery. This is the very first pre-pre-alpha version. "The tiny documentation is at: http://www.sabufrancis.com/acms.pdf"

REBOL 3 - some history on making the Alpha

2007-09-13T08:35:00.000-07:00

The Ongoing History of REBOL Release 3

First announced on 25-Mar-2006, (but hinted at much earlier) REBOL 3 is getting closer to being ready for public Beta.

Please Note: The work in on-going. REBOL 3 is still in ALPHA

01-Jun-2007

The initial R3/Alpha was released to a select few REBOL developers along with a DocBase wiki and special Altme world.

What follows is a brief history of the subsequent releases.

02-Jun-2007 2:05:26 PM

rebol.dll updated - fixes listed bugs. Includes mezz changes.
rebhost.exe updated - graphics fixes.

05-Jun-2007 9:03:55 PM

rebol.dll updated - fixes 13 items marked as BUILT or WISH in tracker.

06-Jun-2007 4:09:05 AM

rebhost.exe updated - contains various graphics fixes including:
-RICHTEXT: DROP keyword fixed, PARA information is now properly passed to the engine.
-italic bitmap font fix
-gob/image with alpha blends correctly
-DRAW: IMAGE keyword fully implemented (draw-test.r enhanced)

07-Jun-2007 7:45:36 PM

Updating REBOL.dll:
-Fixes APPEND problem on objects (also allows APPEND to contain existing words)
-Fixes PERCENT! in many ways.
-Allows -q on command line (or link) to avoid sphash.
-Other small things

11:59:08 PM
Updated REBOL.dll - Alpha 4 - Bug fixes.

12-Jun-2007 9:56:26 AM

rebhost.exe updated:
-fixed bugs
-DRAW: IMAGE now supports NEAREST,BILINEAR,BICUBIC and GAUSSIAN filter types
-image filters now handle properly alphachannel on images
-fixed color keying on images
-added RESAMPLE blur-radius [decimal!] mode to IMAGE-FILTER
-added REFLECT REPEAT pattern-offset[integer!] pattern-width [integer!] modes to IMAGE

5:18:45 PM
Minor update: REBOL.dllscheme actor functions will now trampoline from the datatype actions. Allows them to use a subset of arguments, as long as the refinement names match.

11:13:26 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 6
See Tracker for changes marked as Built

13-Jun-2007 5:48:04 AM

rebhost.exe updated:
-fixed alpha channel bug in image filters in resample mode
-fixed transform crash in image filters
-the pattern widht argument of image filter pattern is now relative to the pattern offset
-updated examples/draw-filters.r demo.

14-Jun-2007 2:23:11 AM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 7
Fixes bugs marked as BUILT.
Fixes /part refinement for many functions including COPY, TAKE, and more.
Allows event creation and field access.,

12:22:43 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 8
Fix in TCP read-buffer expansion.

12:42:09 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 9
Changes TAKE/part to return a series, not value. (Use just TAKE for a single value).
Adds TAKE for strings.

16-Jun-2007 12:36:44 AM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 10
Fixes low level allocation optimization that corrupted memory.
This change fixes the looping TCP write/read test.

2:37:23 AM
New REBOL.dll and rebhost.exe - should fix more TCP bugs.
-implemented SHAPE + all shape commands
-implemented MATRIX
-implemented PUSH; now stores all useful attrributes settings not only matrix
-words reffering to DRAW blocks are now recursively evaluated
-PEN and FILL-PEN can be reset using logic! ie. PEN off
-implemented LINE-PATTERN
-removed FONT
-implemented TEXT offset [pair!] rich-text [block!]
-added FIXED arg to LINE-WIDTH

19-Jun-2007 1:54:01 PM

REBOL.dll and REBHOST.exe updated - Alpha 11,
Fixes various problems in TCP, WAIT, events, etc to help HTTP code.
Fixes GC problem in draw dialects that caused tiger.r to crash.

6:13:41 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 12
Fixes bugs listed in tracker.

6:15 PM
new exe is uploaded:
-removed pattern pen color from PEN
-implemented image on strokes using PEN some-image
-LINE-PATTERN now defines pattern pen color: LINE-PATTERN red 10 20 30
-fixed possible GC bug in recursive draw block references
-reworked gradients, removed all gradient definitions from FILL-PEN to GRAD-PEN
-gradient now support offsets for gradient colors like:
grad-pen linear 100x100 0 600 0 1 1 red 0.2 yellow 0.4 green 0.65 blue 0.8

10:42:46 PM
REBOL.dll Alpha 13
More Tracker bug fixes, including SORT and RANDOM.
WHAT function now works again.
NOTE: CAUSE (error) function removed. Use DO for that. Mezz updated.

20-Jun-2007 3:14:38 PM

REBOL.dll Alpha 14
More tracker bugs fixed.
to-date now ignores weekday in conversion

10:34:18 PM
REBOL.dll Alpha 15
Changes timing loop to compensate for poor timer resolution on Windows. Should be more accurate now.
May also fix a few small bugs.

21-Jun-2007 8:22:32 AM

Published new exe
-fixed bug
-fixed text rendering from inside DRAW dialect block

5:15:59 PM
released new EXE
-fixed bug in gob/color and gob/alpha - now trasparet color gobs works OK.

26-Jun-2007 6:51:26 PM

REBOL.dll and Rebhost.exe - Alpha 16
Also, INPUT works now, but it is not perfect yet (due to problems related to Win32 default console)
Also, you can now use paths in gob and event make blocks for smaller code:
g: make gob! [size: path/size]

27-Jun-2007 12:40:15 AM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 17
Fixes bugs marked as built.
Now MOLD system works (more than once),
Note that second and third on functions perform deep copy now. This is for security, as we move toward enabling module features.

12:22:47 PM
Just posted new Rebhost.exe:
-added vectorial text mode in DRAW
-added additional pair! arg for TEXT in DRAW for word wrapping bounds
-fixed gradient bug
-CLIP now react on translate and scale,
note that you can use DRAW pens, image fills and gradients etc. on the vectorial text (as in R2) until you specify first color in the richtext dialect block.
Also the additional pair! in TEXT command is only for word wrapping. To clip the text you need to use CLIP command. Note that CLIP is rectangular and cannot be rotated.
To enable the vectorial text use: gob/draw: [pen red fill-pen blue text vectorial 50x50 [size 60 "This is some text"]]

4:52:52 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 18
Adds MAP function:
>> map [a b] [1 2 3 4] [a + b]
== [3 7]

28-Jun-2007 1:19:09 AM

Rebhost.exe and REBOL.dll - Alpha 19
Fixes INPUT and long outputs.
Allows CTRL C in long output.
This is a big change for stdio for MS win32

1:33:46 AM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 20
fixes extra lines at end of long print
Also: fixes FOREACH bug

6-Jul-2007 1:45:02 PM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 21
Entirely new PATH evaluation code. This is a big change.

17-Jul-2007 3:32:40 PM

REBOL.dll and Rebhost.exe - Alpha 22
Many changes.
Window event handling updated. Keyboard events, modifiers. Event/window. Window offset and size updated on resize and move.
Many graphics improvements including new EFFECT, DRAW, and TEXT changes and features.
CALL and LAUNCH added so you can run test scripts now from a master program.
Text CARET mapping added, including offset mapping (both ways) and highlighting.
More system/options values are set now on startup.
Vectors can be used now for storage (no math ops): 8, 16, 32, 64 bit integers and 32, 64 bit decimals. Note they are zero based.
Various bugs listed in bug tracker fixed.

18-Jul-2007 2:31:10 PM

EXE and DLL updated - minor bug fixes.

30-Jul-2007 12:50:04 AM

EXE and DLL updated.

2-Aug-2007 7:18:29 PM

DELECT function documented.
change in DELECT from earlier versions.

3-Aug-2007 1:10:23 PM

EXE and DLL updated - Primary changes are:
Many more effects are online.
More defaults for graphics dialect.
DELECT function has changed.

1:14:38 PM
VID updated

6:17:54 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 28
- Forall and forskip added
- They are native functions
- Forskip allows negative sizes

4-Aug-2007 3:03:53 AM

new effect-lab2.r

6:15:15 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 29
- MOLD/all /flat /only fixed
- Other minor fixes

7:38:53 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 30
- more MOLD fixes

10:16:02 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 31
- Percent datatype revised.

5-Aug-2007 12:27:20 AM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 32
- Fixes related to bugs in DATE datatype

1:37:15 AM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 33
- Fixes COMPOSE/DEEP
- Fixes REVERSE on various types
- Fixes char problems

6-Aug-2007 2:00:43 PM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 34
- Removed memory corruption check from bind function.
For some scripts, you should see a little speed increase.

10:23:29 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 35
- Fixes memory corruption from GC'd errors
- Fixes PARSE for chars > 127
- Fixes PARSE with (return) and (break)
- Fixes to-integer of binary eg. #{FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF}
- Allows to-decimal of binary eg. #{4093 4800 0000 0000}

7-Aug-2007 11:25:31 PM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 36
- SHOW optimized for blocks that may contain duplicate gobs or panes with duplicate gobs (avoids double show). Also, efficiently handles words and paths in the show block.
- Various fixes

8-Aug-2007 3:10:27 PM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 37
- Fixes bind when used to bind function arguments. Note that such bindings are relative to the function, and those values cannot be passed outside the function activation frame.

3:45:31 PM
rebhost.exe - Alpha 37
- added ALHPAMUL effect
- added second pair! arg to SHADOW (src image offset)
- added EFFECT command to DRAW dialect
- fixed COLORIZE and CONVOLVE bugs
-para/align para/valign and font/style definitions are now working in richtext dialect
- multiple little fixes and improvements

11:07:56 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 38
- Changes to improve memory stability.

11:31:26 PM
rebhost.exe - Removed the auto-quit on empty lines.

9-Aug-2007 6:59:08 PM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 39
- HTTP included.
Rebhost.exe - Alpha 39
- VID included
- Splash included (written in VID now)

11-Aug-2007 4:59:09 PM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 40
- Fixes a variety of bugs
- Changes in boot for scripts (see system/intrinsics/begin)
- Changes in DO (see system/intrinsics/do)
- Changes in Load (source load)
- System/options files are now files, not strings
- IN now allows IN OBJECT BLOCK (see blog).

5:48:40 PM
REBOL.dll - Alpha 41
- Fixes more bugs
- Especially fixes problem that crashed TRACE.
Note: Beginning with A40, a script provided as an argument to the exe will QUIT when it returns. If you don't want that, add HALT to it.
Also: as of now, you can do urls: do http://www.example.com/script.r

12-Aug-2007 5:21:28 PM

REBOL.dll - Alpha 43
- Foreach on string
- Command line option --halt (-h) added
- Fixes for directories on startup (so editing tools can specify script again).

10:46:45 PM
Alpha 44 - both exe and dll
- Drag and drop files on a window.

13-Aug-2007 12:46:12 PM

Alpha 45 - both exe and dll
- Adds REQUEST-FILE -- but very minimal one - no options - returns only one file.
native file requestor.

15-Aug-2007 2:38:28 PM

DLL - Alpha 46 - Fixes
-POWER with negative number and exponent
-Bug in EXISTS? with absolute file paths
-to money! produces garbage
-Can't convert money! to decimal!
-Can't say to-money $1.00
-SOURCE path
-view? returns false
-GET does not work on path! datatype
-Crash on VID programs run from Explorer
you can now do:
source system/intrinsic/begin

8:30:04 PM
DLL - Alpha 47
-Fixes CHANGE/PART bug (that caused REPLACE to fail)

16-Aug-2007 1:29:24 AM

DLL - Alpha 48
-read %. and read %./ are the same
-function recursion crash
-INPUT is not working after long print
-closure recursion crash
-COMPOSE/DEEP does not copy path!s
-view? returns false.

10:45:07 PM
DLL - Alpha 49
- Add dictionary datatype.

11:01:02 PM
DLL - Alpha 49 A
- Added the necessary parts of the old HASH to make the set functions work again. This makes REBOL a bit bigger, but keeps the set functions running.

17-Aug-2007 11:57:51 AM

DLL - Alpha 50
- Dictionary! is now Map!
- Map! allows strings now too.

1:19:03 PM
DLL - Alpha 50 A - fixes name from prior build.

5:07:57 PM
DLL - Alpha 51 - Slight change to decimal == to use ULPS method.

18-Aug-2007 1:36:34 AM

DLL - Alpha 52
- Adds MONEY! as precision math datatype.
- Very limited implementation, just for early testing.
- + - * / only at this time
- also MAKE money! works
- MOLD too
- auto-reording of args for coersion not allowed (you can do $10 + 1, but not 1 + $10 yet).
The datatype has about 25 digits of precision.
>> $12345678901234567890.12345 + 10
== $12345678901234567900.12345

5:03:20 PM
DLL - Alpha 53
- Rest of Money! datatype (comparision, etc.)

6:28:08 PM
DLL - A 54 - Money fixes.

7:22:56 PM
DLL - A 54 - Money fixes.

19-Aug-2007 1:43:29 AM

EXE and DLL - Alpha 55
- Clipboard device and scheme
- DRAW and EFFECT natives detect errors now (but SHOW does not)
- Minor fix to Money type.
- Includes shadow fix
- Also includes newer VID.

20-Aug-2007 12:09:08 AM

DLL - A 55
-This change defines new function arguments:

4:56:32 PM
DLL - A 56
- SELF implemented - may still be some areas where it is not yet perfect.

21-Aug-2007 12:04:44 AM

DLL - A 57
- Various bug fixes, including change/part bug.
- Adds DECOMPRESS/limit refinement

27-Aug-2007 11:04:15 AM

DLL - A 58 - bugs marked as Built

5:57:53 PM
DLL - A 59
- Rewrite of decimal FORM/MOLD conversion code to conform to the properties of REBOL.
- This is a major change, please test it well.
In general, R3 tries to keep decimals out of E (scientific notation) format as much as possible. But, after 15 digits (or below 10E-6) it will convert to E format.
Percents will never convert to E. Instead, they max out at 15 digits, and will truncate to zero in the other direction.
In addition, the primary conversion is still done by the OS library to keep it as fast as possible. To allow for multiplatform, the OS side of the converter is exported from the HOST library back into the R3 DLL.
This allows porting efforts to select the proper clib conversion to work with R3. (Equiv to _efmt() in Win32).

8:01:29 PM
DLL - A 60
- Offset-to-caret fix

28-Aug-2007 6:56:49 PM

DLL - A 61
- Fixes DEBASE bug.
- Minor fixes

29-Aug-2007 12:27:04 AM

DLL - A 62
- Adds /next and /relax to transcode.
/Next allows loading a value at a time, like load/next.
/Relax will prevent error throws on bad syntax, allowing your code to handle parsing the case.

1:41:53 PM
DLL - A 63
- Various changes.
- Note change in FOREACH (uses [a:] not [:a] var format now)
- Note change in TRANSCODE - use TO BLOCK! for normal translation of code. TRANSCODE is for /NEXT /RELAX style translation method.
- Also, you can now do OBJECT-A = OBJECT-B (including error objects)

2:17:05 PM
DLL - A64
- Updates EXE to be consistent with above changes.

11:26:20 PM
DLL - A 65
- REDUCE/no-set - http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0101.html - useful!
- MAP! datatype finds set-words - so you can use them like:
m: make map! [a: 10]
print m/a

30-Aug-2007 11:25:04 PM

DLL - A 66
- Changes to allow QUIT to be script-relative.

31-Aug-2007 7:01:19 PM

DLL - A 67 - Fixes new bug in DO.

2-Sep-2007 2:45:34 AM

DLL - A 68:
- Allows nesting of the HALT/QUIT/CATCH mechanism
- Bug fixes.
DLL 68 does not allow UNSET values in the default all values typeset.
For example:
f: func [a] [probe a]
will no longer allow unset for a
but:
f: func [any-type!] [probe a]
does allow it

3:34:23 AM
Rebhost.exe - A 68
- gob/options: [resize no-border no-title]

3-Sep-2007 12:07:47 AM

DLL - A 69
- Removed ecvt due to bug in linux wine - when using the multithreaded clib dll.
Rather than depend on gcvt() or ecvt() which vary between OSes and their versions, we now use a direct conversion (which is probably faster anyway).
Note: If the number ranges outside of e-6 to e+15, then we switch back to gcvt, because we know it can handle it ok at that point.
This release also fixes ls (LS) and cd when no arg given (due to change in arg unset handling).

6:19:34 PM
EXE and DLL - Alpha 70
- VID updated - mainly for resize gob option change,

5-Sep-2007 12:00:55 AM

DLL - A 71
- Clean-path added. Currently, works like in R2 where current dir is prepended, but there is now /only to avoid that.
Note that this clean-path should work "to some degree" on URLs.

11:25:13 PM
EXE and DLL A 72
- New VIEW system
- All demos will break.

11:27:22 PM
Updated demos:
effect-lab2.r
drop-file.r
shadow-test.r
stress-effects.r
shadow-test2.r
vid-demos.r
file-catalog.r
effect-lab.r
draw-editor.r
easy-vid3.r
caret-check.r
caret-check2.r
fx-test.r
cursor-test.r
tiger.r
heartbeat-R2vsR3.r
Note: LAUNCHER working again. It is now a mezzanine.

6:26:09 PM
DLL - A 73
* Adds VIEW/no-wait and VIEW/as-is refinements.
* Fixes bugs listed in tracker.
* Fixes a few bugs not listed.

7:45:01 PM
DLL - A 74
* Fixes a time range bugs

7-Sep-2007 2:08 PM

DLL - A 75
* Changes GOB/options to GOB/flags
* Changes VIEW options MODES to be FLAGS
* Fixes default handler: CLOSE uniews window now too.,
Updating example scripts

6:11:34 PM
DLL - A 76
* Removes + on strings.
* Adds ajoin function (high speed version of: to-string! reduce [ ] )

11-Sep-2007 11:03 PM

EXE and DLL - A 77 - V 2.99.3
This release includes major work for porting R3 to Linux and OSX.

The month ending 26 August 2007

2007-08-27T09:20:00.001-07:00

Introducing: user.r

'user.r' is now the elected name for the REBOL user group. Formal discussions regarding the formation of the group are now hosted on Qtask. For an invitation to participate, contact 'btiffin' in the Rebol3 AltME world (where informal user.r chat resides) or email him directly (he is a reasonably frequent poster to the REBOL Mailing List).

Laccio

From Alessandro Manotti:

I wish to highlight a new project I started, and currently in beta-test. It is called Laccio Framework.

I just published some information, Laccio source code, and three examples (I'm completing the quickstart tutorial).

Laccio is a framework, very small, for Rebol, composed by two objects. It includes several important functionalities:

Introduces (and standardize) the concept of "components" in Rebol. Basically, a component is a reusable piece of code, composed by several methods, variables, etc… used to create simple or complex components.
A component is a "template" that you can use to make other component instances (it works even with visual components, like Rebol View!).
Every component uses a MVC-like model. In fact, every component is divided in two parts: View (that manages user interaction) and Controller-Model (grouped in a single object, that manages either the business logic or the data).
Laccio framework efficiently implements messages notification (the so-called events). The concept is similar to the listeners: a component can send a message, under specific conditions, to every other component or Rebol application that requested to be notified when such condition is verified (an application can "listen" a specific message). I wish to highlight this feature: in many languages, only a single method (function) can receive a message, and such method has to "spread" the message by calling other functions; in Laccio, you can directly register as many functions as you want, using a simple syntax!
Creating and/or using components is a very simple task, and a very small amount of work must be done.

Every comment, information, opinions, suggestions are welcome. I think it is a great help for Rebol developers, and it will help us to increase the collaboration, cooperation to create better and more complex Rebol applications.

Laccio Framework

List View

Henrik releases LIST-VIEW 0.0.51:

The month ending 22 July 2007

2007-07-20T20:58:00.001-07:00

UTF-8 Validator

Rebolek announced his UTF-8 Validator which checks and validate UTF-8 files, convert from USC-2 to UTF-8, convert special characters to HTML-entities and vice versa (can ignore selected tags).

available from http://bolek.techno.cz/UTF8-Validator/ as REBOL script and Windows executable.

ReadMail

Readmail is Phil Bevan's VID based email client. He released 4.14.14 & associated helptext on 29th June 2007. It can be found on rebol.org, and alternate Canadian site.

RebTower

Icarii has been releasing new versions of his card game which is inspired by Magic The Gathering. See his news page for new playback mode.

REBOL3 beta

The public beta has been delayed for a couple of more weeks and is now scheduled for early August 2007.

ServeIT!

Dirk Weyand has updated his web server to version 2.7.4 and promises a SSL server mode soon. Those in the know wonder how that is possible since server side SSL in REBOL is not known to be possible to anyone outside of RT.

Cheyenne & Captcha library

Cheyenne 0.9.16 is out, and Cheyenne 0.9.17 should be coming out in a few days. Bugs can be recorded at Curecode. Nenad also announced his draw based Captcha library for REBOL/cmd.

BBC Basic

As a demonstration of REBOL's dialecting, Gemol has started to write a BBC Basic interpreter. Version 0.0.2 can do "Hello World" and a few math expressions.

SQL Lite

Ashley has updated this to version 1.0.4

The week ending 24th June 2007

2007-06-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-16T19:15:00.001-07:00

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.

The week ending 29th May 2007

2007-05-29T16:51:00.001-07:00

rebol.org

Shout out for form-date.r and filtered-import.r
Christopher Ross-Gill has added some nice scripts to the library.

Sunanda updates the look of rebol.org
http://rebol.org

DevCon 2007

Videos posted...
Work continues at making these videos more accessible.
http://www.sahores-conseil.com/?q=node/2

Mailing List

Rebolek announces a Work In Progress regex.r
http://bolek.techno.cz/reb/regex.r

Tim Johnson encounters and conquers difficulty with REBOL for 64 bit Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

Altme REBOL3

Many discussions regarding REBOL 3 especially in the VID+ and gob! arenas

Framewerks announces Hal4000
http://alicefair.com/hal4000/hal4000.zip

Chris would like some input with QuarterMaster in !QM to make the
framework bigger better stronger for all

User Group

Movements are afoot to form a formal user group. First Meeting held on
Altme REBOL3 world under the guise of IRUA.

Softinnov.org

DocKimbel steams ahead, fixing hot things and releasing new stuff.
Cheyenne beta 0.9.10 released to the few, the proud, the strong.

Mysql Protocol Driver 1.1.1 Released to the public
- Multi-statements queries parsing improved. Semi-colons included in quoted strings are now ignored.
- Email!, url! and other any-string! values are now correctly escaped in prepared statements.
- Empty block! values are now converted to "()" instead of "(NULL)".

http://softinnov.org/rebol/mysql.shtml

The week ending 20th May 2007

2007-05-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Devcon2007

Carl Sassenrath posted his Devcon 2007 presentation slides

http://www.rebol.com/notes/devcon07-carl.zip

RebGUI

Ashley: "Build#94 uploaded to SVN. Contains minor tooltip, drop-list, request-menu, on-click and on-alt-click fixes."

Redwerks

Terry announced Rash1.1 Rebol/Flash hybrid Personal Agent.

http://alicefair.com/rash/rash1.1.zip

(RAMBO)
Oldes' HTTP patch, adding 303 response

Oldes "just found, that youtube do not respect HTTP1.0 protocol => sends HTTP1.1 303
response even if client require HTTP1.0 (which is Rebol case). As there is no response
specified for 303 in Rebol's http handler, it can be fixed using:"


 use [tmp][
  tmp: select second get in system/schemes/http/handler 'open to-set-word 'response-actions
  if none? find tmp 303 [ insert tmp reduce [303 select tmp 302] ]
 ]

 ; example test
 trace/net on
 p: open/direct http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=FVbf9tOGwno&t=OEgsToPDskKR0Ng6kANs3Z4VNG81T2tZ
 error? try [close p]

(Note, I think YouTube urls, as above, expire quickly, so you would have to get a more current one.)
(And I think this patch should be classified as a "temporary workaround patch".)

Discussions

Some other concise languages, Mathematica and ContextFreeArt, were brought up.
Ladislav was asking what the best way to handle recursive includes should be in his include system.
rebol vs scheme, associative model of data..)

Mail list:

Dissatisfaction with NEW-LINE argument order and proposed NEW-LINES function with a mini dialect.
Discussion of Rebol equivalents AWK and GREP, ended up with some disagreement over preferred arg order.

Posted by Graham on Anton's behalf

The period ending 13th May 2007

2007-05-13T02:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life just becomes too busy to try and keep to a weekly schedule, so here's a belated report on the last few weeks.

Devcon 2007

Because of the time difference between Paris and Wellington, NZ, I didn't get to see much of the sessions broadcast. It seems each new Devcon brings its own technical challenges, and this year the difficulty was on focusing the camera on the screen. I guess we shall have to wait until the formal videos from the second camera are uploaded to youtube to see what the speakers were pointing to on screen! But the quality of the video stream was excellent.

If anyone attended Devcon, and is able to write a report, we would be happy to post it here.

MySQL driver 1.1.0

Nenad released his latest driver that adds a new preferred method of querying data ( send-sql ), named fields mode that returns recordsets with named fields (neat), and multiple statements separated by semi-colons . This allows you to initialize databases from a standard set of sql statement.

eg: send-sql db read %setup.sql

Unicode

Jerry Tsai has been working on ways to render both traditional Chinese in Rebol, but also other double byte character sets. His work in progress can be viewed here.

Carl Sassenrath Interview

Carl gave a long interview to mark the 1000th issue of Obligement ( magazine covering AmigaOS and MorphOS ) that detailed his early working life at Amiga Inc etc, and Rebol3.

Rebol.org

Brian Tiffin has been hard at working updating documentation on scripts in the library. This will be very useful for new library users.

There is also a new Altme search utility in the library that crosses worlds and galaxies afar. Works even in offline mode.

The fortnight ending 22nd April 2007

2007-04-23T23:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

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.

The week ending 25th March 2007

2007-03-28T00:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-21T02:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-12T17:34:00.000-07:00

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.

The week ending 25th February

2007-02-26T18:38:00.000-08:00

Mailing List

After taking a well-earned breather, the REBOL Mailing List server is back online. Once again, ML is the leading public square for all things REBOL.

REBOL Mailing List

Remark

Rebol Week's very own Max releases Remark:

"Remark allows you to create and manage a complete web site by creating static web pages which are built up from html tags which you define (plus any normal html, of course).

"The tags can be as simple or as sophisticated as you need and because you have access to the full power of REBOL's dialecting within them, you can truly create powerfull and simple to use tags."

Features:

Create your own html tags and use them within your pages. Allows programable tags, and static html based tags.

Multi-page management. Handles all the files in a web site recursively. Even creates dirs at destination, if new ones are added in source.

Multi-site management allows you to configure all of your sites to be used within the same ui, so you don't have to sprawl.

Synchronise source and release sites, copying only user-specified file types (ascii and binary types are separate lists).

Reasonably Fast. The more you leave as html, the faster remark parsing... so its easy to optimise, when this is an issue.

Simple GUI to let you update changes applied to source(s) on a click of a mouse.

Persistently reparsed source files, so that your tags can even use custom tags as part of the html code they generate. This means that the engine reparses until no more custom tags exist within the source page. Allows you to scale and leverage your html layout by creating low-level tags (like menus) and then assembling them in higher-order tags (like a header, footer or even an automatic per style template).

Includes a powerfull set of standard custom tags fully integrated within REBOL: pseudo-absolue-paths, code-view, auto-css, date/time, make-doc (forthcomming)

Page Templates can be built and then filled up by setting up layout and data entry tags.

CSS Friendly .

API defined Global REBOL values allows your custom tags to know where they are within a site and create tags which are page/section/path dependent, even though the same tag is used in all pages. As an example, menus can be different when the current page is a direct link to one of its menu items.

External config files, loaded at run time. Allows you to setup global and per site tags, templates and intrates all sites within one GUI.

Can be a very compact and scalable platform to GENERATE XML files for other softwares to use. Specifically because of Remark's persistent parsing nature. In a future release, remark will get explicit XML parsing tools.

Remark

Rebol.org

PSG AY-3-8910 Study by Marco: "This is a simple study for me to understand the basic principle of music generation.

"This script use rebcode (20 time faster) if present.

"Many thanks to Guest2 making me interrested on this subject (see his script %demo-ay.r)"

Run sequence encoded integer data sets by Christian, Romano and Sunanda: The fruits of the Mailing List competition a few weeks back to provide an API for compacting/compressing sets of integers.

Origami Demo by François Jouen: "Playing with Rebol on Ultra Mobile Personal Computer. Use keyboard arrows for options!"

Calculate working days between two dates by Sunanda: The product of YAMLC (Yet Another Mailing List Competition). "Given two dates, and a list of holidays that occur between them, returns the number of work days between those two days. With the /non refinement, will return the number of non-working days between the two dates."

DevCon 2007

More information on accommodation has been posted on the DevCon web site:

DevCon - Locations

Just over ten weeks left to get organised!

AltME

Rebol3 world currently down as of 1st March 2007 9:00 GMT+13

The week ending 18th Feb 2007

2007-02-21T16:54:00.000-08:00

MS Windows

Oldes' published first version of Windows .LNK file parser

For a demonstration, open your rebol console and paste this in:


do http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/projects/ucs2/latest/ucs2.r
do http://oldes.multimedia.cz/rebol/shortcuts.r
repeat i 7 [print ["=== test" i "==="]
parse-lnk rejoin [http://oldes.multimedia.cz/tests/test i %.lnk]]

RebGUI

Many updates this week. Ashley has made many changes and improvements to RebGUI,
and committed several builds to SVN bringing it up to build #58.

Some of the changes:

Info option now prevents tabbing
Added action-on-tab block to behaviors (works in same manner as action-on-enter)
Fixed modal requestor problem
Button widget rewritten to take full advantage of AGG
and fix some anomalies (e.g. actions now fire on button up instead of button down, replaced
'active facet with options [info], hover effect no longer "sticks" when a popup is called
from a button, etc). And all this in 1/4 of the code! ;)
Numerous widget fixes and enhancements to many widgets.
tab-panel now only fires action on initialization if options [action] specified
spinner now fires action after arrow click
arrow has default size of 5x-1 (meaning you can now create non-square arrows ... needed by spinner above)
Fixed 2 major tabbing issues:
1. tab-on-enter now fires after calculation of next field (so works correctly with show-focus)
2. tabbing within tab-panel fixed (next field is prevented from looking at non-displayed tabs)

Mailing list problems

Currently down due to some type of server failure. Problem is being addressed.

Rebol.org

rse-ids is quite possibly the first REBOL script to be released along with all its test cases (making it easy for anyone else to extend or repair the script).
Test data cases by Peter Wood. Test environment code by Christophe "REBOLtof" Coussement.

(posted for Anton)

The week ending 12th February 2007

2007-02-12T13:19:00.000-08:00

Volkers turn and I am a bit out of touch lately. Scanning my usual sources

AltME

Reichart promised to fix the top 10 annoyances in AltME if we could all agree. We came up with list - here's hoping!

Mailing List

Graham wrote a working script (send-gmail.r) that sends secure mail to Gmail using Gmail's smtp server, and a nearly working esmtps protocol that you can use to send secure mail using a modified send version.

Needs Rebol/Command because of the use of SSL, so, if you need secure email, time to upgrade to Rebol/Command!

Sunandas competition is still running and generating traffic. :)
Its about tuning the search in the Mailinglist-archive. Not really needed IMHO, but people have fun :)

Rebol.org

Seems someone emulated an old synthesizer, PSG AY-3-8912 of MSX. 8-bit homecomputer IIRC. Should test it :)

And something to experiment with Rebol's AGG draw.

Rebol3

Carl was asking about the use of Context of whether it should be deprecated in favour of a flavour of object.

DEVCON 2007

Hotels are being sought for everyone to stay in, but at this time of the year, there is going to be competition with the universities (Sorbonne) and other colleges for conference accommodation.

The fortnight ending 5th February, 2007

2007-02-04T23:20:00.000-08:00

DevCon 2007

Some news on the hotel information is now starting to appear, There is also some new features like an iCal event schedule and the session info now seems to be ready to be populated. Go Go Go, Register and make a session to share your REBOL insight. Be sure to visit the news page for the latest info about the devcon! http://devcon2007.rebdocproj.org/news/news.html

This year's conference will be held in Paris, France on May 10-11.

Mailing List

Sunanda's a Coding Challenge, was a smash... many of you submitted some code and the Mailing list is ablaze with discussion... the competition is still on. the first step of the competition is over or nearly so, but 2 other challenges have been set aflame. An update to come as I get more explicit details on the results so far. :-).

Tips from the masters

Anton Rolls and VID words

Anton has written up a little doc on how to improve your VID styles by adding to their dialects, using words...
read all about it here: http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/doc/vid-words-dialect.txt although this is an integral part of VID, it seems not many users knew about it or are using this handy feature of VID. Thanks for putting some light on this!

REBOL 3

It seems that the community is quite happy with the proposed R3 architecture in general. We can only hope that most if not all of the goodies will be ready for the devcon, so that REBOL Technologies can demo it all to our amazement. In case you missed it, here is the “REBOL 3.0 Component Architecture”

Commercial Spotlight!

This is a new column, We'll be happy to help anyone put a little bit of press coverage on their tools, as long as they're coded in whole or in part in REBOL. We'd like to post info on commercial uses of REBOL based technologies as often as possible, where we show off commercial/corporate applications written in REBOL. Many of you are doing incredible stuff, yet little is know about this high-level (sometimes mission-critical) work being done daily with REBOL.

We might also Put info about older applications written in REBOL too (with the author's permission).

„My Value Driver“ - released by BrainNet / Saphirion
Get your purchasing prices down! „My Value Driver“ provides total product cost transparency with the method of cost analysis for goods and products. This is a tool put to life by Robert M. Muench, nice to see your efforts come to fruition. Note that the app is currently only released in German, but an english version is expected within the next few months.

Here are key highlights of „My Value Driver“:
- Uncover unknown hidden margins in your supplier's product calculation.
- Find out the real costs of production of a product.
- Get the difference to your actual purchased prices.
- Simulate new scenarios: „How is the cost impact if you increase the purchasing volume?“
- See global sourcing cost advantages on the spot.
- Get the best arguments in price negotiations.
- Spring your own product calculation on your supplier!

full information is available in PDF format.
screen shots: one, two, three, four, five, six

SOME TOOL releases

TOOLBAR v0.0.9 - Henrik: "I've uploaded version 0.0.9 of TOOLBAR. You can read about it at http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol in the two latest blog posts, where I also highlight a bug in REBOL/View that causes a crash because of TOOLBAR."

Note: removed erred info about REBOL blog use by Henrik... sorry <ed>

Image panning VID face - Also by Henrik
... read more about it on the above link.

!Liquid v0.6.4 - by Maxim Olivier-Adlhoch
- cleared a few bacteria (microbugs ;-)
- better support for linked containers
- fixed orphaned links (named yet non-linked inputs).
- start of commit concept (just the func layout)
- started !plug core reference docs

to download the lib: http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/download-a-script.r?script-name=liquid.r
docs on liquid project: http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/steel/liquid/index.html
!plug reference: http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/steel/liquid/plug/plug-reference.html

The week ending 21st January 2007

2007-01-22T08:45:00.000-08:00

DevCon 2007

You can now register for this year's DevCon. Follow the instructions on the DevCon 2007 web site. Information on places to stay will be forthcoming shortly.

This year's conference will be held in Paris, France on May 10-11.

In the Wild

Brian Tiffin produces an rich, interactive Periodic Table of Elements. Great application of View features here.

Tim Johnson revises Andrew Martin's 'map function, used to apply a function to all values in a block.

Maarten Koopmans, inspired by the consolidation of his Rugby sources, embarks on building mod_rebol. Collaboration continues on the ‘REBOL3’ AltME world.

Mailing List

Sunanda introduces a Coding Challenge, engaging Rebollers in pursuit of the perfect compression algorithm. Plenty of submissions, but there's still time to displace the current leaders.

REBOL 3

RT present the composition of R3: “REBOL 3.0 Component Architecture”

“This document describes the REBOL 3.0 component architecture from the top design level.”

REBOL and the [Windows] Shell

And finally, a tip from Ramesh Gopal:

“Just a tip to share with everyone who has wanted to get Core to play nicely with the Windows command console.

Core 2.6.2 on Windows (I'm running Windows XP SP2) does seem to work in console mode (the Windows console, not REBOL's). It just takes a little bit of work to set up:

1. Get Jeremy Collake's freeware SETSUBSYS utility from here (unfortunately, the original author's site at CollakeSoftware.com is not working at the time of writing):

http://www.rapideuphoria.com/setsubsys.zip

(What an irony, having to go to another language site to get the file!)

2. Make a copy of your REBOL.EXE Core and place it somewhere on your path. Let's call it RC.EXE

3. Unzip SETSUBSYS.ZIP and run this command:

SETSUBSYS /C RC.EXE

(this changes a flag in the Core executable that tells Windows that this is a console-mode application, not a GUI application.)

4. Lo and behold, REBOL now outputs to the Windows command processor console without opening the REBOL console:

RC -cqsw --do "print {Hello World!}"

(At the minimum you MUST use the -w command line switch to suppress Core's normal behaviour of opening the REBOL console, otherwise you'll get no output on the Windows command processor console. I also recommend using the -q command line switch to suppress Core's startup noise. Another thing is that you must explicitly print or write to stdout to get any output; relying on the expression evaluation output like that found in the REBOL console does not work. BTW, you can still bring up the standard REBOL console: just omit the -w option.)

5. This, too, seems to work:

C:\>echo this is a test | RC -cqsw --do "print copy system/ports/input"
this is a test

6. And it also seems that running scripts that print also work:

; file: HELLO.R
REBOL []
print "Hello World!"

C:\>RC -cqsw hello.r
Hello World!

You may also find it handy to create a batch file that wraps your ‘console-mode’ REBOL so that invocation from the command line is much easier.

The usual disclaimers apply and YMMV.

The fortnight ending 14th January 2007

2007-01-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

OSX
A new beta SDK was announced incorporating some of the 2.7 tools. Still missing some features but good enough to do development on. The news that Apple's iPhone ( one would think that they would lock down the copyright first on the name before announcing it! ) will be running OSX could mean that a future non-locked down incarnation of the iPhone could be running Rebol apps.

Tester
Henrik's case test tool is now at version 0.0.10. Henrik says it is not quite a unit testing tool, but does sequential testing tracking the results.

Mailing List
A bug in the round function was discovered. Looks like some automated tool messed up!

Rebol3
According to the priority list posted last week, this is due to be released at DevCon 2007 in Paris, May 2007. However, there is not much available information on DevCon in English yet ... and as many developers need to plan months in advance, it may well turn out to be a purely French Connection.

Linux
There appears to be a lack of synchronizations of the various flavours of Rebol on Linux. I note that the SDK has not been updated for some time ? 2004. In particular, the draw dialect lacks AGG font support that is available in View. Hopefully Carl will take the time to do some new Linux SDK builds so that OSX, Linux and Windows are fairly equivalent.

reGraph 0.1.4
Maxim has released a new application called reGraph. Its still a prototype, but its also a first view of an applied use of liquid. the whole canvas object is generated through a network of liquid nodes which process the canvas in real time, as you drag the mouse. See the docs.

The week ending Dec 31, 2006

2006-12-30T23:02:00.000-08:00

This week sees a couple of contribution to the REBOL.org library.

1. Session support in CGI environment
by Sunanda

Script : http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=acgiss.r
Documentation : http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/documentation.r?script=acgiss.r

2. How to scan a computer network with REBOL
by François Jouen
Script : http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=netscan.r

3. Beginners example for trapping errors
by Tim Johnson
Script : http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=form-error.r

4. How to identify operating system which REBOL script is running
Script : http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=environ.r

5. NicomDoc update (2.1.0)
by John Niclasen
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/nicomdoc/

Added an alternate way to construct tables. Instead of the need for =row and =cell commands, a table can just be lines (each line is a row) and on each line, cells are separated by one or more tabs. Docs with lots of tables will shrink considerable in number of lines needed. The Math specification (http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/nicomdoc/math.txt) went from 3000 to just below 700 lines this way.

6. REBOL Quick Start Tutorial 5 : Files, Directories and Playing Music
by Carl Sassenrath (REBOL's designer)
This REBOL tutorial focus on reading files, directories and playing MP3 files (laying the foundation to play other music files as well).
http://www.rebol.com/docs/quick-start5.html

As 2006 comes to a close, the REBOLWeek team would like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a GREAT 2007 ahead and thank you for the support.

Happy 2007!

The week ending 17th December 2006

2006-12-17T16:16:00.000-08:00

Marco Coccinelle continues his research into a text markup dialect, and published this demo script.

The week ending 10th December 2006

2006-12-11T03:42:00.000-08:00

Rebgui

For a while now Robert and Cyphre have extensive extensions for RebGui, which Robert uses for a large application. They promised to add them publicly. Which they have now. It still lacks documentation and needs the SVN for download. No demos available yet.

These new widgets (apart from panel) have an impressive range of options/features.
New chart, drop-tree, grid, input-grid & panel widgets). Panel & Input-Grid added to %tour.r, the demo.

Graham reports that there is a big problem with modal requesters in this release so be warned.

Rebol.org

How to know local and wan addresses with Rebol. ipaddress.r By François Jouen.

The week ending 3rd December 2006

2006-12-04T12:42:00.000-08:00

Rebol2

A number of base builds for OSX were released on the 27th November, and a new enbase for the Windows SDK that allows stdio port redirection and CGI handling.

-w for no-window mode - use for redirection
-c for cgi mode - CGI envr flags, redirection

Tutorials
Nick Antonaccio continues his opus magnus which is a tutorial for beginners nearly reaching 300 pages. He has an overview of a mere 100 pages for experienced coders as well.

Rebol.org
sqlab has a modified help function that

enhance original help with a secure way of showing functions in paths of objects and ports and show information about ports similar to objects

Here's an example

help/secure a/handler/set-modes
there is a function inside an object or port
USAGE:
A/HANDLER/SET-MODES port modes

DESCRIPTION:
(undocumented)
A/HANDLER/SET-MODES is a function value.

ARGUMENTS:
port -- An open port spec (Type: any)
modes -- A mode block (Type: any)

Cerebrus
My anti-spam program which expired on the 1st December 2006 has been updated. It should not expire again this decade!

RebGUI
Robert has sent Ashley all the changes he has commissioned .. so hopefully we will see these soon .. once Ashley has had a chance to digest them all.

GLayout
Has a new tabbed pane called switch pad.

The week ending 26th November 2006

2006-11-26T00:52:00.000-08:00

Altme

Shadwolf has released his early demo of his rich text editor.

Chris has been thinking of ports as abstraction to a single table database.

Rebol2

Version 2.7.2, another untested release is now available. Switch is now a native, and has a new /all refinement. Center-face is now relative to the parent-face, and a bug in the IMAP protocol has been fixed. The esmtp protocol has been enhanced .. hopefully ending the repeated questions users have when it does not work for them.

RebGUI

Build 45 was released to trac 9 days ago. More accessor functions added.

The week ending 20th Nov 2006

2006-11-19T16:12:00.000-08:00

AltMe

REBOL Postscript dialect v0.31 released by John Niclasen (aka Geomol)

The postscript command takes a block! as input and gives a string! as output. The output is ISOLatin1 encoded.
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/postscript/postscript.html
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/postscript/postscript.r

NicomDoc Math v. 1.1.0 released by John Niclasen (aka Geomol).

Added bmatrix, which produce a matrix surrounded by brackets. It's the same as doing: left \[ matrix {... } right \]
Also fixed some bugs the last month.
Get NicomDoc scripts and documentation here: http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/nicomdoc/

Form Tools by Cesar Chavez & Ryan Cole

Form Tools allow all data on a face to be managed as a list of data, as opposed to a multitude of individual data elements that must be individually handled.
http://www.practicalproductivity.com/form-tools.html

Bubble-doc (beta) by Anton

Bubble-doc can be used to create relationship-mapping documentation
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/doc/bubble-doc.r

Orca released by Kaj

Kaj : There were a few unreleased bug fixes for Orca and QUIT/RETURN was implemented recently, so I made a new release and put it on FreshMeat:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/rebol-orca/?branch_id=66431&release_id=241129

New released version of GLayout by Max

added switch pad (similar to a tabbed pane), center sizing group with support for margins, new better looks for menu bars and fields, button popup menus, fixed a few little nagging sizing issues (like field and shrinking), fields support round corners, button's dialect now supports two-color setup, and more...

REBOL Technologies

REBOL 2.7 releases http://www.rebol.net/updates.html

Mailing List

Wayne Pierce (WP) highlights that Google has added REBOL to their code search.
Just type lang:rebol at http://www.google.com/codesearch .

The fortnight ending November 5th

2006-11-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

The Rebol Week had a one week vacation!

Well in fact, it was quite the opposite... I was responsible for that week, and well, I was so busy preparing all my releases, that I missed the deadline. Sooo, feeling a little bad, but with great news to bring, here is the article for the latest TWO weeks in the fun world of all things REBOL-related.

max.

REBOL Technologies

OOPS, NO shift in REBOL direction, Mea Culpa!

Carl Sassenrath, has provided an in-depth coverage of current priorities and on-going projects he and others at REBOL Technologies are working on.

Here is the article: Quick Update: Same Direction, Same Goals

This seems to be in direct relation to our last blog, where we wrote that there had been a shift in the direction of priorities at RT. (We are stated on Carl's page as being the culprits ;-)!

Wow, We are now a reference, even for REBOL Technologies... so we'll have to be more carefull from now on, IMHO, to be as precise as can be. I'd also like to give a thanks to all the readers of this weekly updates page, for making us feel like its worth the effort.

Altme

John Niclasen (aka Geomol) shares 3 cool space related scripts

first one is related to looking a mars from the rover's perspective, in an interactive 360 viewer! and two others for viewing (new and older) images of V838 Monocerotis star's "Light Echo".

do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/space/McMurdo.r 
do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/space/v838_06.r
do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/space/v838.r

You can also look at his other (very interesting) stuff (http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/) which contains (amongst other things) an updated version of his excellent NicomDoc format to produce math output.

SQLite release
1.0.1 available at: http://www.dobeash.com/download.html

Ashley G. Trutter, writes:

"Bumped version to 1.0.x as code is no longer "beta" (I actually had a few people email me about that!)

Incorporates new IMPORT function (twice as fast as a tight INSERT loop) and Robert's nested transaction handling logic (so nested BEGIN, COMMIT, END and ROLLBACK statements are correctly handled). Also changed logging behavior so all logging is off by default (i.e. use /log to turn on *all* logging)."

Gregg Irwin shares a TOUCH (file date set) function!

; Here's a TOUCH function if you still want one.
    touch: func [
        {Set the modification timestamp of the file.}
        files [file! block!] "The file, or files, you 
                              want to stamp"
        /with "Use a specified time rather than 
               the current time."
            stamp [date!] "The date and time to 
                           stamp them with"
        /local read-only?
    ][
        if not with [stamp: now]
        either none? stamp/time [
            stamp/time: now/time + negate now/zone
        ][
            if 0:00 = stamp/zone [stamp/zone: now/zone]
        ]
        ; We have to turn off the read-only attribute
        ; if it's on.
        foreach item compose [(files)] [
            read-only?: not get-modes item 'owner-write
            set-modes to-file item [
                owner-write: true
                modification-date: stamp
            ]
            if read-only? [set-modes item [
                owner-write: false
            ]]
        ]
        ; Should we return the time, even though it
        ; may not match the actual stamp on the files
        ; due to OS differences?
        ;time
    ]

New build of RebGUI available!

Ashley G. Trutter, writes:
"Build#39 available. Fixes the above issue and makes two other minor changes:

1) Bumped the min required View version to 1.3.2
2) Deleted the last line of %ctx-rebgui.r (which issued a halt if the script was invoked in isolation - see Ladislav's comment in the SQLite group from 2nd Nov)"

Mailing List

Wayne Pierce setup a REBOL themed Google Co-op search engine Its configured to only search a set of specific REBOL-related official and community sites:
http://knowngood.com/rebol/

Warning, shamefull plug follows ;-)

Well, I guess its always a bit touchy to be one of the editors and also author of some tools, so I hope people wont mind that I write this small column on the relaunch of the STEEL website.>

I'll add that any one wanting to write a little column for their tools can do so, by submitting information on the rebolweek group of the Altme REBOL world. we will be happy to include your stuff here, but we need to know about it first!

STEEL Libraries and Tools

Web Site

The STEEL web site has moved to a new server and was rebuilt from scratch.

I hope it will be more usefull as I have better organized what is there and will be adding/updating content weekly

I am also now switching to the MIT license for many (if not all) of the tools which are being released under the STEEL banner.

I added a (still embryonic) new section to the site called ReTools, where I will document and share many of the tools I have written in REBOL over the years.

Liquid
after Years of work, and several prototypes allowing more or less features, I have finally released liquid. Its a very capable dataflow programming core. Using plugs you can create dependencies, synchronize data and much more. Best of all, it supports lazy computing out of the box! There are already some docs for it here: liquid site

GLayout
GLayout gets a few updates, and now starts maturing near broad usability. You can get the new version, on REBOL.org, like all of STEEL's code. Glayout also finally gets a cool demo application which allows you to test it and get a feel for it. glayout demo

The week ending 22th Oct 2006

2006-10-23T03:30:00.000-07:00

Carl Sassenrath blogged, he is changing directions a bit:

Goes more for newbie-documentation:
"Well, tasks are only as important as you make them. Last weekend I received an email from a new user, and that was the final straw. I gave in and took out a few hours to try my hand at some very basic intros. They are not intended to be a replacement for the other tutorials, but to provide a really basic starting point for new users. Eventually I will fold a few of the older docs (like Ten Steps) into this one."

Rebol2 gets some attention for bugfixes, instead of 100% into Rebol3:
"We have scheduled a number of updates to REBOL over the next couple weeks.

Some updates to scripts:

Rebolek : I've just uploaded TextureLab version 0.3.2 to REBOL.ORG .

Geomol: Apollo 1.4.1 released. The pictures are a collection of the pictures released on the website: http://www.apolloarchive.com/

The week ending 15 Oct 2006

2006-10-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

Blog about Cheyenne, a REBOL based web server

Hot from the 'test' release of Cheyenne, Nenad 'DocKimbel' has started a blog about Cheyenne.
http://softinnov.org/cheyenne/blog.cgi

Need a scroller style for your View apps?
Anton has released a 'Amiga' scroller style.

Source code is at http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/demo-ami-scroller.r

And if you want to do a preview, you can always type the following in your REBOL console :
do http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/demo-ami-scroller.r

INCLUDE , a module manager by Ladislav has been updated.
More information about INCLUDE can be found here >> http://www.fm.tul.cz/~ladislav/rebol/include.html

The week ending 8th Oct 2006

2006-10-09T05:29:00.000-07:00

Maxim has launched "Revault: an initiative to better organise library and re-usable code". Discussion taking place on Rebol3 AltME world.

Carl Sassenrath has been talking about merging the Associative Database Model with Rebol in some way. (see www.adbms.org for an introduction.)

Gabriele continues to improve PDF-Maker 2. Now it can calculate table column widths automatically, and better than web browsers.

Geomol enhances his NicomDoc format with his newly created math dialect.

This week has been building up to DocKimbel's initial release of Cheyenne (now available for download).

The fortnight ending 1st Oct 2006

2006-10-02T17:27:00.000-07:00

Rebol.org
Max has released a new version of GLayout after a hiatus of 2.5 years, and retaining 99% VID compatibility. This is an alternate dialect from VID for producing faces, and is in competition with RebGUI.

He promises

new visuals
extremely stable
updated and optimized for v1.3.2 (use of AGG)
many new styles (menu, explorer, canvas, generic pop-up, ...)
new value inspector allows browsing of live code in a mac-finder type browser
automatic scroll-wheel support in scrollpane real-time scrolling
many new layout possibilities

Check it out in the library

I believe he will be working on some demos that illustrate it's use. He has written some commercial applications but sadly these can not be released to the public.

The rebol.org package downloader repack has also been upgraded using a new version of Glayout and can be invoked with

do http://www.rebol.org/library/public/repack.r

ZLib
Oldes has a Rebol/Pro version of zlib compression/decompression using a dll. It's a rip file so run it to decompress first.

3flex
Chris Langreiter has updated his 3flex script to work with latest View. It's a map editor that he intends to be used as a knowledge map editor.

Rebol3 Blog
Carl asks for more input on console return values. Personally I think I am in favour of a switch for this!

The week ending 17th September 2006

2006-09-19T20:11:00.000-07:00

REBOL.ORG

UPnP discovery
This is script is a pilot to controle a Internet Gateway Device thru UPnP

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

package downloader issues
The package downloader was detected as having issues in the later rebol release (v1.3.2).
author is working on a new version ASAP. testing is under way, expect a release next week!

on AltMe REBOL world

DELIMIT and CONJOIN - Jaime Vargas proposed a new DELIMIT function and initial implementation and sparked some furious creative development from Brian and Anton, with help from others.

OTHER PROJECTS

New DocKimbel MySQL Drivers - I've released an alpha version of a new MySQL driver implementation : complete rewrite from scratch to be fully async under UniServe, optimized decoding in speed (faster code, streaming decoding, etc...), supports only servers v5+. You'll find it in the latest UniServe archive ( http://softinnov.org/tmp/UniServe0919.zip )

3Flex
Chris Langreiter: "I've now updated 3flex with the fixes supplied by Philippe (merci beaucoup!) and some more regarding saving/loading.
If you find additional ones, please let me know!"
http://www.langreiter.com/space/3flex

Easy graphic element Nudges in REBOL|view
A very good example of making view interactive... never mind that its french, if you don't understand the text, test the examples!
http://pl.legoff.free.fr/docs/informatique/rebol/view-effect-gallery.html

Henrik: LIST-VIEW 0.0.48 released.
History:
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view-history.html
Source:
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view.r
Docs:
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view.html

PDF Maker 2
update:
-added embedded tables (i.e. tables between paragraphs)
-text colors, fixed table parsing bug
-table options
-graphic commands, cell decorations
http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2

Ladislav Mecir's web site updated:
quote from someone on Altme: "as an example of the use of dialects spider.r is an enlightening example."
Site http://www.fm.tul.cz/~ladislav/rebol/ (Spider.r, REBOL identity article). Ladislav Tried to post the info to the REBOL Mailing list, but didn't succeed

The week ending 10 September 2006

2006-09-09T17:39:00.000-07:00

Batch Download by Anton
v1.04 is released and now supports FTP URLs.
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/util/batch-download.r

reb2exe by Arie van Wingerden
Needs a way to create an REBOL file into 'exe'?

reb2exe uses the open source Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) and allows you to embed your own icon as well.

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=reb2exe.r

Uniserve by "Dockimbel"
Doc has released a new snapshot of the high performing Uniserve server. This release added some bug fixes.

http://softinnov.org/tmp/UniServe0919.zip

More information about Uniserve, visit >> http://softinnov.org/rebol/uniserve.shtml

Want to see Uniserve in action? Oldes now uses Uniserve on for his REBOL-Flash Microchat site. >> http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/chat.html

Oldes also points us to ccSinogrammes; a program that aids you in learning the pronounciation and the correct writing strokes of Chinese characters.

http://www.rebolution.net/sinogrammes.html

This week saw a lot of discussions on BCD for REBOL3 in AltMe.

The week ending 3th September 2006

2006-09-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

Altme and Qtask
Gabriele is busy with text-formatting which are being driven by qtask requirements. His projects are

Pdf-maker 2, which is basically a TeX-clone written in Rebol. Yep :) His latest stuff is here, although that is the raw stuff from his development-folder. Looks like this.
Qml, which is a text-markup-language similar to make-doc and developed for QTask. Lately posted to rebol.org: qml-base.r and xhtml-emitter.r . Also remember QML-Ed mentioned in our last article.

Oldes looked for async networking for his IRC-client and some things, which let to some fresh attention to uniserve (france). Oldes is happy now :)

Rebol3
Carl is busy with Rebol3 and blogs about it, the focus is currently on modules, as well as a discussion on the best word for his provisional "pop".

Rebol.org
Graham noted a script to receive and send to gsm phone in the library, which we should have noted a few blogs before :)

In the Wild
Anton has been busy collecting all this work into a consistent style package for VID. It's looking a very viable alternative to RebGUI!

You can try out his styles by issuing the following from Rebol.

load-thru/update http://www.rebol.net/reb/index.r
do http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/gui/style-gallery.r

The week ending 27th August 2006

2006-08-28T01:22:00.000-07:00

In Carl's Rebol 3 blog it was announced that Ladislav Mercir is now in charge of REBOL 3.0 test suites.
Rebol 3 blog article

Rebol 3's ordinals (FIRST, SECOND etc.) and APPEND have become native! functions.

Henrik Mikael Kristensen published a VID style, PAN-IMAGE, which allows panning of large images and scrolling of small images, with keyboard and scroll-wheel control.

Henrik's LIST-VIEW has been updated.
See Henrik's blog for more details.

Henrik's Tester is now at version 0.0.7:

My site, Site Anton, is semi-operational once again since the last move.

Gabriele Santilli released the first public version of a client-side Qtask Markup Language editor, QML-Ed

Some test output from Gabriele's PDF-Maker2 is now also available.
PDF-Maker 2 is experimenting with a new type-setting algorithm, which figures out how to break text (adding hyphens etc.) so it flows into desired shapes (columns).

The week ending 20th August 2006

2006-08-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

Rebol3
Carl has indicated that Rebol3 will implement a class based approach to support object methods. The driving force for this is a better C interface, and ease of implementation.

Ladislav Mercir has been appointed charge of developing the test suites as well as other duties. So, if you need a particular test case, contact Ladislav.

Carl has also updated his blogging script to support comments - source available. It looks pretty nice.

Rebol.org
Cyphre has released my-http.r which allows transparent cookie handling in http(s). It looks like this was funded by qTask.

Edgar has updated his imagemagick script to support the latest version. I have not been able to get this going yet, but I have been able to use the comlib with the imagemagickobject.dll com server.

For example using the Com+ server and the comlib, if you need to display an image in View that is an unsupported format such as PDF, or Tiff, you can use imagemagick to convert the file to png, and then display it.

file: %mypdf.pdf
im_obj: createobject "ImageMagickObject.MagickImage.1"
objectMethod im_obj {.Convert(%s,%s,%s,%s)} compose [(file) "-format" "%m,%h,%w" "temp.jpg"]

will convert a pdf to jpg though I believe that ghostscript is also required for this particular conversion.

The week ending 13th August 2006

2006-08-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

Pdf-maker 2
Gabriele continues to make progress with this long awaited upgrade to pdf-maker. You can see his current development status http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/ though the source remains in a state of flux.

Rebol Timelines
It appears that RT has taken some umbrage at the suggestion that they appear to jump from project to project. Of course, we only said that in order to extract more information! And here is their response - a timeline of current activities http://www.rebol.net/projects.html

QML
QML is another markup language used exclusively by the developers at qtask. Head honcho Reichart promises more open source:

"We will be providing the source to a client level QML to HTML generator next week."

MikeL was asking for Textile support instead of make-doc, but Gabriele feels that QML is more powerful.

I personally have a deeper interest in producing PostScript for high quality printout .. and perhaps I will post my solution another day.

Reboltalk
Newbie, Barry, was complaining about the lack of organised documentation while praising it

"I am amazed at the genius of this little piece of code"

Shades of Mark Antony! Of course, those of us who have run with Rebol for years read the documentation as it was produced and likely don't notice the lack of organisation so much. Still, this is a priority too for Rebol Technologies.

Barry did point out that Rebol might have a place for embedded devices and the like. For instance, my HP Laserjet 3015 uses Tomcat, a java Apache servlet engine to control the printer from the windows desktop, when Rebol/View would be a much nicer solution.

The week ending 6th August 2006

2006-08-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

Recycle Refinements

Carl asks whether garbage collection should be triggered on each recycle for Rebol3. Experts : post your opinions!

LDAP and Radius

Reichart let slip that they have ( nearly ) working support for LDAP and Radius. He also said

" We have not published that source, but I'm cool with it being published. It is not fully tested yet, in fact it will be tested very soon. You have to pound on Edgar to get him to post the source."

So, if you need this, pound away!

PDF Maker

Gabriele announced that everyone using the PDF Maker on View 1.3 should update to his latest version, as previous ones contained bugs.

He also offered a preview of what you will be able to do with PDF Maker 2.

The week ending 30 July 2006

2006-07-30T00:18:00.000-07:00

List-View 0.46 release
Henrik has released updates to his List-View widget, an extension of the List widget.

For an update of fixes and new features, visit
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view-history.html

A more detailed introduction of what List-View does can be found at
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view.html

Source code is available here
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/list-view.r

Browser Plugin
Joshua Mitts has brought updates that with Carl back from France, the team will be working on fix for the win2k platform.

The fortnight ending 23rd July 2006

2006-07-24T02:07:00.000-07:00

Like Carl who took 3 weeks off recently to tour France, we took last week off and are catching up now :)

Rebol.org

An interesting set of scripts have been released including these that caught my eye:

Spellchecker for Linux to be used with VID text areas from R v.d.Zee
Network Tools including ping, netstat, finger etc with a VID front end from François Jouen

Mailing List Announcements

Analyse-It! is a new, cross-platform web site traffic analysis software from the prolific TGD Consulting

AltME
Henrik released his 0.0.5 version of his toolbar . This turned out to be quite tricky in handling the event code, and Anton pointed to his prior work in this area with his event demo code.

Henrik ( ever multitasking ) also continues to work on his tester program, and a screen shot is available with version 0.0.6. I believe it allows you to trace variables, and as you can see, uses his toolbar.

Anton also gave us this little tip on how Rebol/VID allows us to do the same thing in many different ways - in this case, to set the text in an area field to wrap:

view layout [area wrap]
view layout [area para [wrap?: yes]]
view layout [area with [para: make para [wrap?: yes]]]
view layout [area with [append init [para: make para [wrap?: yes]]]]

Phil released an update to readmail 4.14.3, and also has started a blog on the same.

RebGUI
a new more bug fixes this week with a nasty recursive bug spotted by yours truly, and quickly fixed by Volker. Cyphre has also posted some table changes and fixes/enhancements to the SVN.

File Transfers
Over this last weekend I found myself stuck with the problem of transferring large files from one PC to another. My own hosted account had run out of ftp space, Google has a 10Mb limit for mail attachments, and it was out of the question to use a USB drive to take the file from New Zealand to the USA!

Since I was logged in by remote desktop on a live very busy web server, I did not want to install any applications in case something went wrong. After tearing some hair out, I realise that I could use my own synapse-chat server which has file sharing! I just dropped the chat client in a directory, fired it up, and connected both PCs to the chat-server and did the file transfers. It's good to know that the software one writes turns out to be useful!

Reichart tells me that qtask has file sharing as well, with recovery for both sending and receiving files as well as a https mode. It uses a Rebol script called qfile, which is apparently open source .. so I shall look forward to seeing this source when it is released.

The week ending 9th July 2006

2006-07-10T22:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry, somewhat late. Was melting. (Volker)

Some fun:

Cyphre: Well, here you can play with the Superformula:

do http://www.rebol.cz/~cyphre/superformula.r

Full discussion on the ML

Some windows:

Anton:
Added demos/ado.r - ActiveX Data Objects read and manipulate data from a data source.
Updated COMLib website a little bit. Amongst other small changes, added demos/speech.r (text-to-speech)
(see last weeks "Anton has released 'COMLib-anton'".

Some VID:

Henrik:
TOOLBAR version 0.0.3 released.
Toolbar is a new layout function for creating a MacOSX or Windows style toolbar for VID.
Files:
http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/toolbar/toolbar-manual.html
http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/toolbar/toolbar.r
http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/toolbar/toolbar-demo.r

Got some "cool" on altme :)

Some script-library:

%call-spellchecker.r new on rebol.org.
Needs ispell, usually found on linux. And the path to it must be edited.
A quick search finds ispell for windows, http://www.projectory.de/ispell/ (not tried)

Sunanda mentions: One other spell checking in the Library, complete with open-source english language word list:
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=spellck.

The week ending 2nd July 2006

2006-06-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Announcements:

Windows/COM Support
Anton has released 'COMLib-anton' (Benjamin Maggi's COMLib, reengineered).
COMLib is an interface library that allows REBOL to talk to windows applications using COM.
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/os/windows/COMLib/

Callbacks have been removed to assist with implementation so that the behaviour is no longer asynchronous, and errors are now thrown as Rebol errors so that they can be trapped with normal Rebol error trapping.

RebGUI
Cyphre has been contracted to bring 'grid' support to RebGUI. Grid support will allow features like visibility of columns, scrolling, keyboard navigation, programmable navigation and other cool stuff. License will be BSD.

NOTE: Improved systray support for windows will also be looked into.
Timeframe : 3 weeks.

Plugin

After an initial announcement that the Plugin was being deferred for work on Rebol3, Carl agreed to "multiplex" work on the Plugin if developers can define a set of features that define what is required to complete the plugin. So, up to us developers to finalise this list if we want to see the plugin this side of Rebol3!

and from our man in gay Paree

Carl "Just so you know for sure: we do plan to make a 2.6.3 (1.3.3) update to fix various R2 bugs, including a range of OSX related issues."

MySQL Driver
Dockimbel release a fix for MySQL driver released today (v1.0.7):

o Fixes a comptability issue in handshaking with new servers using old passwords format.

See http://www.softinnov.org/rebol/mysql.shtml

Puzzles

To make sure our readership is not entirely passive, we are going to give you, our dear gentle readers, an intermittent task. Every so often you will be asked to tackle a simple Rebol puzzle, and we shall name the winner of the best solution with or without our reasons. If there is only a single entry, our task will be much simpler :)

Here's the first one - a parse task.

We have a string of text, and inside that text, some words are capitalized, and end in a colon. So, we have words like "TITLE:" and "SECTION:". We wish to identify all such words, and mark them up with <strong > and </strong > for printing in an html page. You can choose either to modify the string in-situ, or return a copy with the markup.

TIP OF THE WEEK:
A question on converting binaries to different bases brings up the usage of enbase.
eg.
USAGE:
ENBASE value /base base-value

This week tip is brought to you by Anton.

The week ending 24th June 2006

2006-06-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

A quiet week this one ...

Copy large files

Carl has written a robust file copy utility that copes with files larger than available memory, and also calculates a checksum.

Sintezar

Rebolek has released his first public beta "The Digital Phase Distortion Synthesizer PM-101", The Digital Phase Distortion Synthesizer. Batteries not included but it does come with some instructions.

Mailing List

Quiet here also. A question was asked about how to read Gmail using plain core. Basically it can't be done without SSL which only comes Rebol/Command. If you've got a spare US$349, you can purchase it here.

VID+

There were some discussions about the new VID for Rebol3 on AltME. Gabriele posted his RFC but unless you have access to Rebol3 world, you won't be able to comment! Hit the mailing list instead with your comments.

The week ending 18th June 2006

2006-06-18T02:21:00.000-07:00

Mysql v.1.0.6

Dockimbel has finally decided, after 4 years of beta-testing, to release a version 1 of his long standing and useful mysql driver!

"I've just run a big stress test with 40'000+ requests generating around 2Gb of traffic without any trouble ! No bad handshakes anymore if you're using v5+ tables and new passwords." - Nenad

Mailing List Tagging Project

Not nearly as long in the making, but the library team has managed to tag each message after a 2 year effort

"Every thread on the ML archive has been eyeballed by hand (and / or some semi-automated tools) and many threads have been tagged as to their "purpose" /semantic content" - Sunanda

Rebol Plugin

RT have announced a new beta release of REBOL/Plugin. This release includes several new features, including:

Multiple instance support -- you can now have up to 5 instances within one IE process.
Automatic updating -- after this release, backwards-compatible updates will come automatically with user consent (no uninstall required).
Smooth install for FireFox and Mozilla.org-based browsers
Now compatible with Opera and all Mozilla browsers compatible with npruntime.
do-browser now functions in Mozilla.

Note that the old demos have not been updated yet and so will not work with the new plugin. However, you can try it with the synapse chat demo. Hopefully someone other than Eliza will be online!

Rebol.org

Brett has released his parse-tree script which ".. is a function that returns nested blocks and words that represent the structure of your input, based upon parse rules that you give it." - Brett

Checksums on large data

Ever wanted to do a checksum on a large bit of data such as an iso image but found that Rebol crashed or appeared to lock up? I've always used external md5 utilties to do this for me, but it now appears that Rebol has been able to do this for some time using a checksum port!

We do have to ask why this information has not been documented some years ago ... and wonder what other Easter eggs remain hidden.

The week ending 11th June 2006

2006-06-10T23:10:00.000-07:00

"well, after too many coffees and in between too many projects, here it is finally... my first visible contribution to 'The REBOL Week', this week's post and a new layout. I hope you like the new look and feel. It should be easier to read and a bit less cluttered in general." -Max

REBOL v3

Unicode!
It is now official, Rebol 3 will support Unicode natively, Yippee!!! There seems to be several options open, like how to treat unicode encoded rebol scripts. There is mention of support for at least Utf-16 and Utf-8 within a new unicode! datatype. RT also plans to support the usual series functions on unicode! strings. Don't miss your chance to voice your opinion here: http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog.r?view=0032

TO-HEX considerations for 64 bit integers
Follow the topic here: http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog.r?view=0031

REBOL Browser Plugin News

It seems RT is working on auto-updating the plugin and allowing more than one instance of the plugin to run within on browser instance. more details here: http://www.rebol.net/article/0277.html

REBOL Community Project Updates

OpenGL Server
John Niclasen's OpenGl server improvements continue: "New version uploaded! Added some new functions like gluBuild2DMipmaps, which can build mipmaps for textures." Still only for the OSX, there is a good chance that a client running on Windows will be available shortly. http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/OpenGL/

RebelBB
Although not released yet, the RebelBB team continues work on their cool 100% REBOL bulletin board system. Did you know you could get the source to this tool by clicking on the "code" button of the BB itself? http://www.digicamsoft.com/cgi-bin/rebelBB.cgi

MySQL
DocKimbel has released a new version of his MySQL protocol driver.
"Good news : I've finally reached a very stable version of the mysql driver with v5+ servers ! The stability garanted only if using a database created with a v5+ server, copying old 3.x files in v5 server works but results in a big mess and unstable behaviour. Exporting/Importing v3.x data in v5 server using SQL flat files works very well (except for user with passwords, better recreate them in v5 directly)."
http://softinnov.org/tmp/mysql-protocol.r

Rebudoko-It!
v1.5.0 is now featuring:
+ 30 new special Sudokos
+ an editor to create your own Sudokos
+ a solver for automatically solving Sudokos
web: http://www.TGD-Consulting.de/Download.html
Reb: http://www.TGD-Consulting.de/index.r

A few announcements from Ryan Cole
A simple to use progress indicator I use in my automation scripts...
www.practicalproductivity.com/files/progress.r

Snip and splice, must-haves for text processing...
www.practicalproductivity.com/files/snippers.r

Some tools for working with headers and allow you to disable http redirects... The following is not well tested, so feedback is welcome.
www.practicalproductivity.com/files/http-tools.r

Try Joystick Navigator If you have wrist issues from using the mouse (windows) . No rebol inside, but it may help make more rebol software.
www.practicalproductivity.com/joy-nav/

Ryan also has a patch for sending html emails. Its pretty rough at this point, so contact him if you must have it.

Beer!
The release version has been finalised and is ready for distribution. It is expected in the following days.

New Tools On REBOL.ORG

metadata.r - Gives access to OSX Spotlight Metadata
download it!

ngbg2.r - Download the current picture of the day from nationalgeographic.com
"Saves images to a location of your choice. This new version can now download all past POD (pictures of the day) images starting from 2001-04-21 to current date."
look for more details within the code's header itself!
download it!

rm.r - Remove part of a string using parse
This is a short One-line which might be helpful for learning or just a nifty func to add to your utility belt.
download it!

vprint.r - advanced, flexible, selective output/tracing/logging module
features: Extremely easy to setup and use (drop-in equivalents to Print/Prin/probe/?? ... even in logs! :-), hierarchical nesting of any output (tracing), transparent logging, on-the-fly selection of output, "allow and deny" any combination of individual tags to be output/logged , postponed output buffer for tight loops (not implemented for log).
download it!

Updated Tools On REBOL.ORG

printf.r - Wrapper for the printf and sprintf C routines
Are you missing the good 'ol printf or sprintf? Did you know, they've been wrapped for REBOL? The only downside is that you need a license of rebol which accesses dll (SDK, command or view/pro)... but for those of you who do... its a welcome script. Also a good script to look at for learning library usage... clear and concise. :-)
download it!

That's it for this week. Remember that you can promote any of your REBOL efforts to 'The REBOL Week' compilation by posting to the REBOL Mailing List , or on either the 'announce' or 'rebolweek' groups of the Rebol3 AltMe world.

The week ending 4th June 2006

2006-06-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

Looking like a quiet week. So I (this time Volker) collected everything :)

Recent questions from the ml:

How to get a directory-list?
'list-dir shows directory, but how to get the files in a block?
simply "myDir: read %/c/temp/".

As usual the questioner was pointed also to "use the source, luke".
Still an unknown fact that rebol includes most of its source, as in "source list-dir" :)

Alessandro tried a bit networking and asked how to send data from the server back to the client. "serverPort: open/lines tcp://:80" and so on.
Gregg noted "WAIT returns the client port, so you can INSERT data into it.", from there on its easy :)

"I'd like to know if Rebol can extract system informations ? like processor type and speed, ram size, mac adress, netbios names, hostnames, installed softwares ... and so on"
the suggestions got toward using shell-commands. "Ms Windows can use "ipconfig" to get info about network; "net" let you get info about folder sharing, "route" about routing, etc...)". In that thread there is also some info how to check on which os the script runs, Gabriele has a nice function

Rebol I/E plugin and accessing page objects?
Does not really help, but yes, there is an ie plugin an even an alpha firefox/windows-plugin. And the ie-plugin can call javascript somehow. And Chris has done that before (Source).

On altme:

Sometimes questions can be asked like this:
view layout [box red key 'f5 [print "how do I capture F-keys?"]]
Single message :) btw the answer is:
view layout [button "F5 Button" keycode 'f5 [print "got F5"]]

Geomol continues work on his opengl-server, has mouse support now.

Anton has a patch for ftp. Because the inbuilt make-dir/deep with ftp does not work correctly.
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/patch/ftp-open-new-patch.r

Henrik wanted to let user send prefilled email and was pointed to "browse mailto:". Interesting what "mailto:" can do, as DideC pointed out by this link.

DocKimbel, who wrote the mysql-interface, seems close to a fix for a rare but nasty handshake-problem.

Robert & Cyphre have published some cool features and fixes for RebGui but the trac documentation for these have yet to appear.

Altme-beta goes 1.2.3 . Main feature: no auto-syncing of all files in the shared folder, better for people with low bandwidth connections.

Henrik notes "looks like rebol/view ubuntu version runs fine on ubuntu dapper". (which is important because dapper is fresh released and everything :)

Carl Sassenrath, author of rebol, is using Mac/Intel as development system. The growing number of Mac-users here look happy. :)

Rebolek: "http://krutek.info/rebol/hardcode.zip - This is first version of Search'n'replace-kind of utility. Please, let me know what do you think about it."
(that was addressed to our more private altme-circle, but.. ;)

The week ending 28th May, 2006

2006-05-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

REBOL.org :

Sunanda has written a new article, Reading CGI input data safely .
Accompany source code is available
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=safe-cgi-data-read.r

Graham contributed 'skype.r', a rebol script to call Skype via com. Requires /Pro or /Command
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=skype.r as well as the necessary dlls as documented.

Gregg has contributed 2 scripts
- file-date-comparison-ctx , which allows you to compares file dates using a dialect
- file-size-comparison-ctx, which compare file sizes using a friendly dialect

Xavier Debecq contributed a script XPDev that allows XP programmers to manage their documentation.
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=xpdev.r

AltMe :
OpenGL for REBOL
John Niclasen, aka Geomol, had created an OpenGL solution for REBOL (on Mac OS X).

More information available at
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/OpenGL/index.html

Mailing List :
Alessandro's question on "How to read a BIG file" gives rise to a good tip.

TIPS : /seek mode was created in the 'open' function one to rapidly access large files.

Read more on 'seek' here : http://www.rebol.net/article/0199.html

On the NET :

OSNEWS.com :
Internet2, a not-for-profit consortium of over 200 US universities, collaborated with SURFNet to provide Internet2 Detective.
Internet2 Detective provides an easy way for the average computer users to detect and find out the status and capabilities of their current network.

Sighted on RebelBB, forum for French REBOL community, is another full-blown BBS written in REBOL.

This REBOLWeek is brought to you by YekSoon, from Singapore.

The week ending 21st May, 2006

2006-05-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

This weekly summary idea has been well received, and we now have 4 new contributors. Please welcome Sunanda, Volker, Max, and YekSoon.

Although we do not aspire to become an e-zine, like the much missed Rebol/Zine, we will be happy to accept small articles that we can publish within the constraints of the blog format.

Plugin
Discussions continue on the security model to be used by the plugin. A design document is being drafted by Josh, and should be available for comment within a couple of weeks.

Scripts
Anton has updated his batch-download.r script so that you can now skip a file, pause, and abort. Very useful stuff. Graham's demo using this script has been updated as well.

Vollker has released his mini RCS system named snapsets.

Henrik released version 0.0.41 of his very useful list-view - a powerful extension to the list style.

Gabriele released his structure matching and rewriting tool. With this you can match a structure using parse rules, and replace it with another. Sounds cool and potentially very useful especially in relation to the following news about contexts.

REBOL3
A context is a set of words, for example the arguments to a function or the members of an object. Prior to Rebol3 once a context was created, it could not be extended. But in some instances, this constraint will be released.

Bind will now expand contexts. So, instead of having to create a new object to add to a context, we will now be able to do this:


obj: make object! [a: 1]
word: bind 'b ob
set word 10
print obj
a: 1
b: 10

This is related to Rebol3 using modules which means allowing for multiple global contexts instead of a single global context, and similar to the Forth vocabulary.

AGG
As you know, AGG is now used by View as its rending engine. Recently AGG 2.4 was released, and is now able to render Flash shapes. Does this mean that View at some time in the future may be able to playback Flash movies?

RebolTalk
This web forum has now added a section specifically for Francophiles.

Orca
This Rebol clone has been chosen to be the default scripting language for Syllable, a GPL operating system. In the meantime a binary release is available.

The week ending 14th May, 2006

2006-05-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

The REBOL community, though small, spreads itself thinly across the globe, and in many different forms of electronic publishing. There has been a preference in particular for Rebolers to hide in dark secretive worlds even away from other Rebolers though this has improved with the publishing of some content from Altme Rebol3 to rebol.net.

This blog is therefore an attempt to summarise the weeks news and activities in the Rebol community.

RebGUI
Robert announced that he had contracted Cyphre to work on some fixes, and to build a tree widget. Anton announced he has finally debugged the area widget of some long standing issues.

http://www.rebol.net/altweb/rebol3/chat303.html

Mailing List
For the first time in living memory, a poster had to be removed from the list for creating a lot of ill feeling. Let's hope it is the last time.

Gregg, Ladislav and others discussed a collect function implementation. What does a collect function do?? Apparently it is designed to reduce some dancing that you do when you wish to accumulate values.

So, say you had a function to grab all the results from a database query


get-results: has [ result ][
    insert db-port {select * from database}
    result: copy []
    foreach record copy db-port [
        append result record
    ]
    result
]

This would be written


get-results: has [ result ][
      insert db-port {select * from database}
      collect result [ 
              foreach record copy db-port [result: record ]
      ]
]

Browser Plugin
Work on the Internet Explorer, and now Firefox plugins has recommenced with the welcome return of Josh Mitts.

New Scripts
I released a download manager using Anton's batch-download function. It was needed for my purposes to allow users to select the downloads required for Synapse EMR, and grabs files from multiple sites. License is BSD.

Prolific's Edgar released a wrapper for ImageMagick, and I also released a wrapper for Dosadi's Eztwain library.

Gabriele continues to study the sources to TeX so that pdf-maker2 can do flowing text, justification, and pagination. He did release a pre-alpha version of make-doc3 to me so that I could experiment with a LaTeX emitter, and the early version of this was released.