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

Week Ending 31-Jan-2010

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

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

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

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.


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.