[REBOL] calm before the storm
From: moliad:gma:il at: 10-Jun-2008 19:22
hi everyone,
this is an open letter to the whole community. sorry if its a long post.
anyone is welcomed to post questions/comments to this thread, and I
will be very happy to keep it going.
As I have hinted a while ago (and for some insiders to which I've
talked about it/even shown it), I have been silently working on the
real Revault site for a little while now (basic site layout and all
user login/join operations are finished, including 2 step registration
processing with mail confirmation). Before you ask, there is no
public release date for the site, this will require a few steps, like
finding a proper hosting solution, and maybe even the registration of
some domain name.
An online preview of Revault is planned, which will be hosted at a
temporary url, eventually.
The site will be built using a mix of php and remark technology, and
will be AJAXed as needed. As remark v2 gets up to speed, the php side
of things will be weened out slowly as changes are applied to the
site.
For Revault, as well as for many other tasks, I have reached a point
where I need to generate quite a few graphics.
There are MANY graphic packages out there, but nothing seems to fit
the bill for what web integration really needs. They are either
biased towards photography, illustration, or are just so damned badly
designed, that creating MANY images, often cut up into little pieces
AND allowing further changes without loosing all of the information
required to rebuild ALL images exactly the same at a touch of a single
click, is impossible, let alone modify some aspect globally and
regenerate them afterwards.
furthermore, a tedious task is the one needed to re-integrate them
into the web pages or the applications which use them.
Curing this specific problem has been something I have wanted to do
for a long while.
Thus I am working on a new application, 100% rebol-based called Picture-lab.
There is a lot of directions and an exponential amount of features I
can add to such an application and, indeed, it has already been
re-architectured 3 times, and completely re-coded within the last few
days. I have spent quite a few number of hours wandering off in my
head thinking about where I want the application to go, and the number
of feature branches one can build up is just astounding ... in manner
of minutes... hehe.
---------------------------------------------
so what does this mean to you? quite a few things, in fact:
---------------------------------------------
-Obviously, we will all benefit from having a new, eventually
extensive graphic/paint package (even if you're not a rebol user,
btw).
-Remark v2 will be getting a boost in its project priority, and more
exciting news is expected about it in several weeks.
-GLayout is being improved upon almost daily, and many new robust
features are finding their way. In just 3 days:
-------
* Cured the largest layout bug in history I didn't even know existed yet.
* Completely revised/extended and patched the rebol/view text
editing for all field and areas. The path allows us to control and
react to each keystroke. (added before-key/after-key function support
to face/feel directly) this engine even allows you to change the
current key or action being typed and allows you to consume events,
preventing the editing to occur... as an example: creating an
integer! restrited field type is now a 3 line affair, even preventing
copy/paste of invalid values!
* Added a pair! view style which reacts to mouse scrollwheel...
scrolling over the text, actually modifies the coordinate under the
mouse!, but its still a field, and can be typed-in directly... what's
more, you can't enter anything else than a value which can be
converted to a valid pair!.
* Added on-focus/on-unfocus function support to all faces.
* Many little fixes and improvements.
* Many more are planned.
- People will now have a reference point for just what GLayout can do
in real-life. I (and others) have used GLayout for a lot of
applications but its always been private, commercial stuff. now we
will have a public offering which uses it, and quite a big one at
that.
-Picture-lab will be hosted on rebol.org, you will be able to download
it and see its guts. As is the habit for my coding, It will be
littered with comments (often verbose), to helpy you understand what's
going on. As a refence, my code often has more than 30% of its source
size decidated to comments.
-------
* this will force me to release a slew of yet unreleased libs, as the
application progresses
* this will force me to update all of my libs on rebol.org for each
release of picture lab
- I am using Picture Lab as a use-case for R&D on application
conversion to a full dataflow model.
-------
* the first version has none of liquid or liquidGL within it. its a
voluntary decision, even if building it using liquid from the start
would have been MUCH simpler.
* once I have the initial feature base functioning at a production
quality level, I will convert most of the application into using
liquid.
* this will give me a lot of reference into what porting an
application to dataflow entails. Leading to some documentation on the
subject for sure.
* will allow a lot of comparative bechmarks on liquid's speed,
interactive capabilities, application size differentiation, and
development impacts.
- I will be using liquid in a public application (starting at second
full release) .
-------
* people will be able to see how dataflow works, and more
specifically, how to use it with liquid itself.
* it will probably lead me to improve upon the liquid model, adding
a few of the planned, next-generation features I've been postponing
for a long-time (any of: shared dependencies, pull message
parametrization, branched caching management, two-tier disk/ram
caching ).
* it will force me to release many of my currently private
liquid-based libraries, including the multi-layered graphic engine,
which allows any draw stroke (or combination of them) to become an
entity, juste like a face, or a R3 gob!, with feel-based mouse/focus
interaction capabilities.
--------------------------
So, as you can see, there is a lot of activity planned for the comming
months, and all of this is already in motion. A lot of the above, is
either done, or underway, so its not a wave of wishfull thinking. Its
been hard to keep a lid on most of this, since, I've been working in
the shadows for a while... only hinting infrequently as to what I am
doing, not always in public either.
only thing left to do is ask about any features you wish picture-lab
would have in order to help you manage your graphic needs for web and
application work. Its possible I already thought about it, but having
feedback will help me raise priorities on any future development.
rebol on !
-MAx
