World: r3wp

so what do you prefer? Getting rebol console not knowing what to 
do, or getting simple console with "Type desktop to start the Viewtop." 
and visiting visual world with plenty of examples and demos to run?

But I do agree that having that directly in browser is kinda cool.

Well, I understand your position well, I just try to defend REBOL's 
position. We are trying to get things right for R3, we are just not 
yet there ...

Well, point being, I don't have a whole lot of use for REBOL/View 
because I don't care for native apps.  And as far as I'm concerned, 
REBOL could drop windows and mac support for REBOL/View and just 
run in a virtual linux machine with a lightweight X-windows.  I'm 
a big believer in VMs.

(and letting those VMs do the work, rather than port: http://hostilefork.com/2007/11/03/virtualization-and-the-integrated-circuit/
)

(Nice thing about making your "one version" linux is that then people 
can download pre-configured VMs with the software installed and not 
worry about licensing of windows or os/x )

In any case, thanks for listening... again, I'm just trying to understand 
the direction.  It sounds like you're suggesting a distribution of 
REBOL could be made which did not include bind to the host's native 
GUI but targeted the browser/server/UI and had dialects for that.

Maybe REBOL/view's dialect or a subset could be used for that, even...

I do appreciate there are applications that don't belong in a browser 
at this point (e.g. World of Warcraft, some 3D modeling, etc.) it's 
just that REBOL seems more like a text processing / messaging language...

But AltME does seem like it's playing catch up to the likes of Meebo 
http://www.meebo.com/meebo/

I'll look at cheyenne... TTYL

catch-up to Meebo? Only hardly. Are they secure? :-) Lot's of spam 
there, just basic toolkit awailable. Typical ajax rich-app wannabe.

Well, I just wanted to give a non-Qtask example.  I don't know how 
secure AltME fundamentally is compared to, say,  Gmail.

I guess time will tell, but my only point is that if the effort had 
gone into a web-interface-compatible view dialect instead of targeting 
native then REBOL might be quite popular today, it would also be 
easier to deal with things like UNICODE in the interface...

PHP is a nightmare and got popular because they made it easy to write 
web apps.  Er, at least easy to get started with a hello world web 
app, and people pushed forward from there.

Gmail is not https?

there will be some attempts into generating 1:1 html VID interface 
me thinks :-)

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8155

Is that secure enough to compete with AltME's security?

If I got some Finnish hackers and gave them a task to hack into my 
gmail account vs. my AltME account by watching my wireless network 
traffic, would you bet $10,000 that they'd hack Gmail first?  :)

I don't know whether it's right or wrong, I just know that people 
aren't investing in GUI dev anymore for conventional "forms based" 
apps unless the form engine is a browser. Speaking broadly, here.

I am no security expert, but how they can easily hack https? Or is 
that an irony? AltME should, in theory, be secure :-)

I'm no security expert either, that's why I was asking!  But I guess 
I am just saying that native programs don't seem to be to me in the 
long run a security benefit over a web-based one... thus I'd take 
security out of the argument for why REBOL/View would be better than 
REBOL/WebView.  It could be made to use https out of the box, I guess..

What I dislike on the web though, is the fact than once you try to 
do something more complicated, you involve some monstrose js libraries 
which are bigger than rebol itself. The whole concept does not sound 
well integrated to me. But never mind - web 2.0 will offer better 
support for offline apps - Google Gears, Mozilla's FF3 attempt, etc.

Well, such arguments could be applied to Windows or any other infrastructure 
that REBOL is running on.  You could always write straight to the 
video card, go past the drivers... hack the BIOS... :)

Windows installation, more or less bare minimum these days, for XP 
SP2 is over 4GB

Well, don't shoot the messenger... as I say, I do believe in good 
native apps, just don't think it's where REBOL can "win".  Of course, 
success is up to each person to define.  For some it means making 
the thing the way they wanted it, and I understand that notion well.

Programming is not all practical, some of it is art form, and people 
have different ideas of what makes "good art".  One person will like 
the forum chat that is 2KB of source because it is 2KB of source, 
even if they can't select text and then get a right click context 
menu to copy it to the clipboard :)

That doesn't matter to them because of other assessments of elegance. 
 I just feel that my own aesthetics of what is elegant or inelegant 
are being redefined by the likes of Gmail.  I sort of don't care 
how it works when I decide to like t, I use it and notice its nice 
properties.  That gets me to the next question when I assess a new 
development platform, I ask: "how can I make something as good as 
that using your tool?"

If the answer is "you can't make something that good without a lot 
of work, but you can make something else that's not as good rather 
easily!  here's how..."  then my interest wanes, because I am only 
interested in the case of matching the best of breed programs I've 
seen.  Right now those are increasingly web apps.  And I think they're 
winning because of what I referred to vaguely as "leverage".

Too much to read, so the answer to my question might be up there 
somewhere. If it is, just point me to the time of the answer, and 
I'll look it up, but here goes:

Fork, what is in your opinion the benefit of having the application 
inside the browser?

Many things taken care of automatically.  If you like AltME but do 
not like Gmail or say Freebase, you won't agree... http://freebase.com/view/en/carl_sassenrath

Pekr has an aesthetic argument against the idea that the platform 
of the future would have lots of bloated javascript powering its 
behavior.  I am just being more practical, and don't understand why 
I would care about how much javascript is implementing the UI any 
more than I'd care how big the windows GDI DLLs are.  What matters 
is the dialect... the rest is platform I'm willing to ignore how 
it's done.

I've also argued that if I've got a browser loaded anyway (I always 
do) then REBOL having its own layer over the native services for 
REBOL/view might be smaller but it is academic at that point, as 
both are running.

I guess we could talk to Reichart and see how much time went into 
developming AltMe. Then we could find out how much time has gone 
into gMail, along with how many technologies are used in each, for 
both the front and back ends. Obviously the scale of things skews 
direct comparison.

Well Reichart believes what I am saying, hence Qtask... I am looking 
at the source and just pondering why they are solving this instead 
of having it be the general emphasis of the REBOL interactive environment, 
in the basic download people get off the web.

If you view the browser as OS, then you also have to take the bad 
with the good. Both FF and IE shut down a lot more than my OS, bad 
pages cause problems, PDFs opening can hang things, memory consumption 
makes me restrt them, etc.

That's Carl's call, and he has strong ideas about how to do things. 
:-)

Having worked both with VID and with some ajax technologies, I far 
prefer VID despite its shortcomings in Rebol 2. VID3 in Rebol 3 is 
a very different beast though and compares more directly with Cocoa 
or QT. It just doesn't compare with ridiculous javascript based GUIs.

Also, as I understand it, qtask is browser-based for acceptance as 
a product, which is not REBOL's main goal.

keep in mind that VID was largely written by Carl in about 1 week 
with a few additions later on.

As a developer, I prefer REBOL, but I readily admit that REBOL hasn't 
advanced as I hoped in some areas. e.g. the plugin has enough issues 
that a client of mine is having a new UI built in Flash to replace 
the REBOL version we did initially. Of course, the REBOL version 
took very little time, and the Flash version is costing about seven 
times as much.

Many things taken care of automatically.

It's like starting a program with
#include <all.h>
and link it with all.lib.

I see programs running in an OS with dynamic linking etc. being superior 
in every way than running in a browser. I can't think of anything, 
that's better in a browser. It doesn't mean, I dislike browsers. 
I use browsers a lot. They're good with hypertext.

Note I'm not saying that average REBOL programmers would program 
in javascript, any more than they are dealing with HWNDs just because 
REBOL/View talks to windows.

Maybe the problem is, that it's hard to get a good OS with easy access 
to the needed resources, and only those that's needed? So developers 
look for platforms, where it's easy, therefore the browser.

If a REBOL programmer need to produce a lot of javascript, we just 
build a REBOL dialect producing that code! ;-)

Or C#, or SQL, or... :-)

I am not arguing that REBOL/View should not exist.  And in fact though 
I am talking about how I like Gmail I do currently use Apple Mail, 
a native program, to read and send messages via Gmail's IMAP (usually). 
 I'm just saying that the reason people are targeting the browser 
now instead of native code is because browsers have one of the most 
important features--efficient multilingual text layout in a 2D space, 
with inline images and such.  I can't embed a YouTube video here 
in the text box... if I type in a hyperlink it's not clickable... 
right click can't copy text, etc.

That's the basic limitations of VID, not a feature. None of these 
limits will be here in VID3, so if you want to look at it as VID3 
vs. the webbrowser layout engine, VID3 is a far bigger "threat" to 
it.