[REBOL] Why are there no PDA portsof REBOL available? Re:
From: elutz::apriori::de at: 9-Sep-2000 23:43
Hi all,
thanks for your answers! I think for the time being everything is okay with
Rebol, especially when it comes to learning Rebol it's good to have it handy
on all kinds of Intel machines in order to establish a large developer
community. However, I try to find out where the IT market might arrive in,
say 3 years. The reason for this: besides my personal sympathy for Rebol, am
I in a split-brain situation here, personally vs. professionally: should I
invest here and let my programmers build up Rebol skills, should I recommend
it to corporate customers?
So, I try to derive my expectations by sorting out the paradigms that exist
in the moment and ask, where does Rebol fit in?
1/ Client / server -- Rebol fits in; but as I wrote before, language
environments have nearly become a commodity (even MS now has Windows Script
Host for nothing)
and the urgency to choose an appropriate scripting is not that high; there
are more than enough, more or less ugly, baroque, clumsy or not efficient,
but most people obviously live with it.
2/ Servants aka Napster, Gnutella aka peer-to-peer aka Manila, Vanilla,
WikiWiki, Weblogs and the like -- Rebol fits in, easy learning curve for
occasional users, have a look at xml-rpc at www.langreiter.com, even Intel
steps in: www.peer-to-peerWG.net, the Music industry majors are highly
agitated ..., case not closed.
3/ Big iron -- Rebol fits in, but the implementation phase in a computer
data center can be agonizing due to the conservative, defensive, high
availability mentality there. One must have very good arguments to change
anything here!
Probably needs an Oracle OCI interface for high throughput (would roughly be
by factor 45 faster than J2EE), probably (for banking transaction) CICS
and/or MQ Series interfaces.
4/ Server farms, ASPs, ISPs -- Rebol fits in if one can convince the
management that Rebol is a more safe environment than Perl CGI that animates
more users to use the Rebol offerings (making the point with "Perl w/o the
complications", generating more traffic they can bill): needs mod_rebol for
Apache and RebolScript for IIS. Would also fit in for rules engines offering
highly flexible business rules / workflow modelling.
Mainstream in the near future: J2EE, good for the 3-letter hardware vendors,
and fat CRM systems.
5/ PBX w/ telecom handset equipment -- difficult for a small company to
penetrate this market because an OEM like Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, or
Ericsson owns the proprietary telephone OS (welcome back to the future: just
the same debate might arise like the recent debate of MS as a PC monopoly).
Current devices don't allow for download of code into the handset and there
is only the Symbian iniative with EPOC on the horizon here.
6/ The question now is: what is the niche market that only could be occupied
by Rebol now? I think there is at least one market segments coming up:
Processing of requests prepared by intelligent voice recognition software
(IVR) running on small gadget-like machines. Rebol offers the most advanced,
elegant, and efficient solutions here by its dialecting:
sell MSFT at USD$10
,
show candlestick chart for JNPR
,
acknowledge POS transaction 1234567 for Walmart
pay EUR$20 from my account 1234 to account 5678
stream video The Kabbalist now and charge my account 9999
Also at the visual edge of it: have a look at www.thebrain.com, could also
be done with Rebol/View! No more bureaucratic desktop metaphors for GUIs ;-)
I've already had the chance to see a bit of what is ahead with UMTS handsets
in the next 3 years; due to their size they will have voice control as a
primary input method; and don't forget: this is no longer a case for 'them
over there in Europe' like it was with GSM. UMTS is a worldwide standard for
the first time!
As I mentioned above, it is unlikely that mobile handsets will have Rebol
available baked in to their EPROMs, but UMTS armed PDAs could be equipped
with Rebol.
What do you think about it?
Eberhard Lutz
Frankfurt, Germany
