World: r3wp

Ill do. Thanks.

HNewbie here and considering purchasing View/Pro. Not rich so I was 
wondering, will I have to pay again when Rebol3 comes out?

licensing for R3 hasn't been discussed at all so far. you should 
probably ask your question to cindy at rebol dot com.

isn't it preliminary to talk about licensing of R3, when even alpha 
was not posted? :-)

(so we don't know much about architecture, I mean - e.g. language 
extensibility via plug-ins ..)

I'll ask Cindy: only thing I wish to know is if DLL access is not 
free in R3 if there will be a (cheap) upgrade path for R2 licensees.

BenK, I waited a real long time to purchase Pro/sdk but glad I did 
as I had a project come up that required binding my app into a simple 
to use .exe.

Well, I have no such requirements, no commercialisation of anything 
I write (it's just for my own and my family's use) so there's no 
way I can justify coughing up much money; just looking for the bare 
minimum I can get away with

good question on the licensing. I'm also about to buy the SDK and 
it would be nice to know how much it's going to be worth until a 
3.0 SDK comes out.

If Cindy answers, I'll pass it on here...

For thos einterested: just received e-mail from Cindy stating that 
there will be a (cheaper) upgrade path to R3 for R2 licensees, butno 
details available just yet.

.

G'day,

hi :-)

I'm new to REBOL (discovered it by accident searching for internet 
operating systems) and was pleasantly surprised to discover this 
powerful language/environment with an active/passionate community. 
I'm not a programming guru, but would like to understand the language/environment 
and the types of applications it is good for (and not good for). 
So would anybody be able to point me to the "idiot's guide to REBOL"? 
Does REBOL provide architecture documentation/guidelines and/or frameworks 
for the development of scalable, fault tolerant, manageable, with 
hot code swapping for soft real-time 24x7 applications? Thank you 
in advance for your recommendations.

heh, huh, tought questions :-)

Well, you joined our community in the correct time, for us we are 
close, actually very close to change REBOL millenium. 1.June there 
will be REBOL 3 released to selected developers. REBOL 3 is BIG change 
in architecture, for the good of course!

We will get things like threading, most of the stuff is going to 
be open-sourced, we will be able to extend rebol by own components, 
modules will be available too, and many other changes.

For things that do exist:

Resources:

- http://www.rebol.com- corporate site, you will find docs linked 
there

- http://www.rebol.net- developer's central. Sadly site was much 
more rich, but there was a server crash some time ago. But - still 
valuable rources - test releases, Carl's blogs, RAMBO bug database 
etc.

ah, and I forgot - http://www.rebol.org- script archive, mail list 
archive

Good, I guess I can go straight to REBOL 3! Will there be documentation, 
tutorials, architectues, etc. etc?

yes, of course, there should be. Part of the project is - DevBase, 
DocBase. DocBase is going to be based upon MediaWiki. I suggest you 
to install latest View release and then run Carl's DevCon slides. 
DevCon was held in Paris few weeks ago. Videos should be available 
shortly.

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

R3 should be released to public July 15. Of course there will be 
some bugs to sort out, some things to finish, etc. In the meantime, 
you can study some docs - most things will stay valid. It is not 
change in philosophy, whole architecture will just get much stronger.

Now for some frameworks:

Thank you for the links! I briefly saw some of the information, but 
not being a guru, I'm really looking for the "idiot's guide to REBOL" 
that gently introduces the reader to the power of REBOL through simple 
examples so I/others can "think deifferently" about programming and 
undo all the years of bad habits from other languages.

We have XML-RPC for intercommunication, my guess is - not used much, 
but fine when you want to connect to server, which does use it.


Rugby - RPC broker. VERY easy to use, you would be surprised! You 
simply start server, you define which functions you expose, something 
like server [my-func1 my-func2] and then you just connect. It uses 
functions stubs, so actually your source code is not revealed to 
client.

REBOL/services - architecture developed by RT themselves, which will 
be part of every REBOL release, to standardise. You can find it via 
rebol.net IIRC. There are some docs, examples. It is not fully finished, 
it does not work if you are behind the proxy, and is not properly 
async, hence ppl work for R3 (which is async by default). Very strong 
concept, and once R3 is out, we will ruin other languages world via 
simplicity. You should also learn more about dialects, what they 
are, how those could be used, etc.

I live in the East Bay of Northern California, and I'd be interested 
to meet REBOL developers/users in the area, if anybody is interested. 
Also, out of curiosity, where are the active developers located?

Uniserve - multiplexing engine, kind of Medusa (Python). Uniserve 
engine is used for Cheyenne web server (look for that group here), 
and it is kind of cool web server, faster than Apache 1, fully REBOL 
based (well, who said scripting languages are slow? ;-), you don't 
need to install anything. It allows you to plug/unplug services when 
server is running!

active developers? Here on AltME plus ML ... we are small community, 
but you mostly get your response/help in minutes/hours ....

also - in Rebol/View, start desktop and go to rebol.com site to see 
some tools, demos. Right clicking them you can get to its source 
code ...

If you are are the norm, then this group is very responsive and helpful! 
Are developers using REBOL in there jobs or mostly in their spare 
time?

some older resources - http://www.rebolforces.com/, weekly activity 
- http://rebolweek.blogspot.com/

Are people many building tools for REBOL, or are they building "killer" 
applications? If so what types of applications or industry domains?

mostly a spare time, but look at Carl's presentation - he sumes it 
up there too. There are few developers, doing REBOL full time:


- few top developers present here work for RT on contractual basis. 

- there is a company called SafeWorlds (Reichart's company) - he 
employs tens of ppl IIRC. Their new system is http://qtask.com, 
front end is web 2.0, but whole back-end is REBOL based.

- few developers working on their own - Henrik, Ashley, DocKimbel 
(mySQL, postgress cool protocols, Uniserve, Cheyenne)

well, REBOL 2.0 generation allows mainly PITS (programming in the 
small). Some are building tools, or just some styles for View, then 
release to public. PPL do build applications, but I am not sure those 
are "killer" ones. E.g. AltME - secure from the very beginning, fine 
for your small team, but is that killer app? Hard to tell :-)

I forget few others, let me add them:

Graham - EMR system for doctors - http://synapsedirect.com/default.aspx


Ashley - RebGUI - alternative gui system for View, less resource 
hundry, less free form, but more complete, fine docs! - http://www.dobeash.com/


Maxim - he does stuff, no one properly understands, he is kind of 
crazy, but we like him :-) Data Flow engines etc. Look for Still, 
Liquid, Elixir, etc.

and of course, there is one commercial system, which was nominated 
for Webby Awards in 2002(?), along with Google - REBOL IOS.Pity it 
is not supported much, but you still can buy it. With R3, altME, 
View and IOS concepts will merge, and what we will get will be kind 
of virtual OS ;-)

I've "meet" Ashley, a very helpful Aussie who sang the praises of 
REBOL and got me conected to the Rebol3 world! So a big thanks to 
Ashley.

It seems that the the time might be right to develop a "killer" application 
that leverages the power of REBOL3 ;-)

yeah, of course - any suggestion? :-)

Well actually I do, and the customers are ready for a major change, 
but the "killer" application must be scalable, fault tolerant, manageable, 
support hot code swapping, and by priced right.

what kind of app are you about to build? Will you use also REBOL 
gui? Or a web front end?

I believe in Carl's vision "REBOL is perfect for lightweight distributed 
applications". Users need light-weight responsive gui clients that 
can work both online and offline. The evolution of the Web is moving 
(slowly) in this direction, with AJAX/Flash/JavaFX as examples of 
a more responsive and rich gui clients, BUT it's too complex and 
unreliable. The industry is adding kludge upon kludge to "fix" the 
problems resulting in further complexity and code bloat, but what 
is needed is a clean approach that captures the essence of what made 
the web a phenomal success in the first place - any body could set 
up/develop a web site and they did. Enterprise data centers need 
scalable, reliable, manageable (server) applications that run 24x7 
on commodity hardware ata reasonable price. The user PC's should 
require zero management for the applications, which is the primary 
(only?) attraction of the web ui. Question if the application is 
simple to manage and delivers the functionality the user wants, why 
do they need a fat complex os? As an example my kids get online to 
play games, research homework, etc. and they hate it (so do I) when 
the PC/OS gets in the way. Also, that PC/OS is a major source of 
 trouble with viruses and lack of (simple) control to what my kids 
can access.

absolutly correct, and that is imo why you are here :-)

re: tutorials. How about: http://musiclessonz.com/rebol_tutorial.html

Other examples. Google (and other NetSuite, etc) is developing suite 
of "microsoft office" online only applications, but I can only speculate 
they are working on how to make it also work offline as well. Microsoft 
is working on making office work on the web as SaaS (or S+S as their 
marketing refers to it), so the writing is on the wall.

IMHO, I don't believe hese companies are capable of developing a 
clean solution, in fact it may not be in their best interest.