World: r3wp

To answer your questions towards REBOL browser plugin:


- we don't know, if they will allow plugins, do we? But if they do, 
we can create one, why not?


- Josh disappeared long time ago, security doc he was supposed to 
work on, was never finished. But most probably non-ability to properly 
secure browser plugin was one of the reasons why R3 effort started 
...


- with browser plugin, you better don't allow call to local system, 
nor any call to system API. So the question is - what happens to 
'call and 'extensions? Even if you would display security requestor, 
it might be considered a threat, as users are kind of dumb, and many 
will click YES anyway. So the only chance probably will be to build 
special Hosts, including everything we need for a plugin


- there might be some special version of plugin, with signing and 
certificates, so e.g. RT would inspect the extension, and claim it 
being secure. But I still don't know, if it is going to be enough 
...

A lot of my stuff I use lives in the cloud now ... Evernote ( just 
recently installed ), Dropbox, Googledocs, Googlewave, my own EMR 
app ...

Anyway, this is a threat to the traditional desktop .. I thought 
we should just do a threat assessment :)

Wouldn't want R3 to be irrelevant before it was even finished.

ChromiumOS comes at the end of 2010, not for your general HW, but 
only from some HW partners. Anything can happen till then. Other 
than that - why it should be a threat? We can make plugin, and live 
in their space. If it allows only webapps, not linux native ones, 
plugged into Chrome "desktop" via some API, then it is total crap 
...

They are really not any special, they are just google. Look at Moblin 
(Intel sponsored effort), it uses similar paradigm of simplified 
desktop. Those systems are good for some TVs, set-top-boxes, etc.

I expect that they will add support for http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

If VID3 is so cool as it looks so far, and makes building apps rather 
easy (instead of tonnes of html and JS), we might as well use them 
to our advantage, via plugin ....

I already proposed to Carl, to release also browser plugin code, 
apart from Host code. I think that R3 plugin might be here in few 
months, if someone picks-up development. Wrapper to NS API will just 
be the same.

hmm, tech news group .... we are OT here :-)

Hardly any chat here anyway these days ...

This is nice summary from Thom Holwerda - http://www.osnews.com/story/22505/Google_Unveils_Chrome_OS

http://lifehacker.com/5408932/chrome-os-virtual-machine-build-ready-for-your-testing?skyline=true&s=x

ChromeOS as a VMware image

I think the development of Boron is a bit of a shame. The effort 
should be directed towards R3 instead.


Isn't diversity a good thing in many cases? There isn't really any 
other REBOL-like, modern, internet-ready language out there used 
at large. (I also think about the "despair and anger" about programming 
languages, that was linked in the "Chat (not web public)" group.) 
I think, competition might actually be a good thing in this situation.


I was looking for, what project "Wildman" really is/was, and I found 
this page:
http://www.rebol.com/priorities.html

That's written 5-January-2007. I think, language competition is needed.

I think, language competition is needed.


I completely disagree. It sounds to me like you're not in touch with 
what R3 is about, which I don't understand since you have such a 
great insight to REBOL programming:


- You know that our resources are scarce. There are very few REBOL 
experts and they are all working.

- You know that R3's source model will deliver the much needed flexibility 
in extensions, hosts and open source code.

- You know that R3 development is moving forward at a steady pace.

- You know there is a clause to put R3 in other people's hands, if 
RT bows under.

- You know that the R3 design proces relies heavily on one single 
reference.

- You know that RT can't work any one bit faster if a different developer 
with similar goals comes in to compete.

- You know that dividing REBOL in separate implementations will kill 
one of its main advantages

What can competition possibly give us?

Diversity is what brought Linux into the sad state it's in today.

Hm, I didn't know, I knew so much. ;-)

Should I reply or not? I'm not really in a mood for a deep debate. 
I'll comment each in short, and that's it.

Ah, Kumite :-)

1. "You know that our resources are scarce. There are very few REBOL 
experts and they are all working."


If an expert can't help by delivering C code, which is needed, I 
guess, then it's better, if that expert use his code elsewhere. (See 
e.g. Gabriele's last post in "!REBOL3".)


2. "You know that R3's source model will deliver the much needed 
flexibility in extensions, hosts and open source code."


We still wait to see these things. Do you expect people to wait forever? 
I can understand, many use their REBOL knowledge and try to create 
something similar themselves, because they're tired of waiting. If 
there were alternatives, people didn't have to wait, but could move 
back and forth between languages. That's happening with many other 
languages.


3. "You know that R3 development is moving forward at a steady pace."


And it can continue to do that, even if there were competition. Actually 
competition might speed some things up.


4. "You know there is a clause to put R3 in other people's hands, 
if RT bows under."

No, I didn't know that.


5. "You know that the R3 design proces relies heavily on one single 
reference."


Yes, and that put REBOL developers in what situation? With alternatives 
and competition, how would the situation look? I don't think, it 
needs to be a worse situation than the present one with alternatives.


6. "You know that RT can't work any one bit faster if a different 
developer with similar goals comes in to compete."

No, I didn't know that. Also if the alternative were open source?


7. "You know that dividing REBOL in separate implementations will 
kill one of its main advantages"


So there can be only one? We have R1, R2 and possible R3 in the future. 
R3 seems to be not very backward compatible, when it comes out. What 
if there came an alternative, that was more compatible with R2, than 
what R3 will be? That can't be bad for all our present code written 
in R2.


I'm sorry, if I offended you, I didn't mean to. I like change. And 
I like good design.

Geomol - sometimes I wonder about your ignorance(?), sorry. You are 
very clever guy, so I really wonder, what is the reason to hear argument 
like in point 2) Henrik is right - who is more informed than the 
community members? I remember the time when Carl invited me to R3 
GUI world. You all gurus were there, yet he had to invite person 
like me (causing a noise many times), because of lack of input. So 
what are we complaining to? Replies to blogs are similar matter. 
Just don't tell me, you are not informed.


Te link to beta project plan - http://rebol.com/r3/docs/project.html
was posted here, was posted in November status update IIRC. Twitter 
message says, Carl is working on Host code NOW. Yesterday we posted, 
that Carl reported on R3 chat succesfull separation of Host vs kernel 
and that he is working on MinGw support. The host code is being worked 
on NOW.


So how can you post argument like you posted in point 2)? Isn't it 
a bit ignorant and disrespectfull to those who care to work on R3? 
How much support do you expect? I do care to remind Carl to update 
blogs, we do care to spread info even here, yet you claim "do you 
expect ppl to wait forever?". 


And even more so - do YOU expect anyone to wait for mysterious ORCA 
like project to be closer than R3 is? ORCA actually IS open sourced, 
for many years. How is that it did not bring competing environment 
to R2 at least to date? (not to mention its architecture is arcane 
compared to what R3 provides us?)


We are really small community. Everyone of us, can weight his own 
free time. So now decide for yourself, where do you put your free 
time REBOL wise. Boron, or R3? As for me, the answer is clear - my 
energy goes to project, which currently has chance to be completed 
in close future. Splitting our efforts at this stage can't bring 
anything usefull imo ...

I don' t see anyone splitting their effort between R3 and Boron. 
Carl is working on R3, and Karl is working on Boron. Nobody else 
is doing much of anything. Carl would never work on Boron and Karl 
could never work on R3, so nothing is lost

Splitting efforts is all hypothetical, as everyone else seems to 
direct their full effort at just talking

I'll have to put in an exception for Brian here :-)

And I for Henrik. He has alos contributed heavily to R3 mainly, but 
not exclusively, to the GUI so his contribution is not so visible 
at the moment.

Geomol, I'm not offended. I'm only wondering about the seeming lack 
of awareness on the amount of energy that Carl has been putting into 
R3 over the past 3 years and being commnunity members, we should 
all know, right?

I don' t want to repeat this discussion, but Carl' s effort is not 
the point. It' s being three years late compared to the promised 
date

If R3 had showed up as promised, I would never have had to bother 
with ORCA and Boron

Promised or predicted?

Promised; review that link Geomol posted above

There was a promised date? When?

I said I don' t want to repeat this discussion...

The thing I find so strange is that people are so unaware of the 
development pace of R3 which is why it makes so little sense to work 
on competing projects.

This is not the place to discuss this, but another, strategic issue 
remains. The modern open source climate around programming languages 
will never accept R3 without there being an open source alternative

well, screw that. I'm not interested in those alternatives. I'm interested 
in R3.

Good for you. Now all the other programmers will say screw REBOL, 
unless you can wave a do-it-yourself option at them

Well, screw them too, because it doesn't sounds like there is any 
appreciation of why Carl has designed R3 in the way he has.

You' re seeing things into this that aren' t there

I'm seeing that Geomol finds that it's a good idea to have a competing 
project to REBOL 3. Given the way R3 is designed with as many open 
source parts as possible and as many extensible parts as possible 
to provide a platform for potentially hundreds of developers to extend 
in nearly any direction, I'd say that idea makes little sense.

Again, that' s your opinion. R3 is not just vying for your support

If you were to scratch old Amiga faithfuls from this community, I' 
m afraid I would be the only one remaining

I wouldn't say it's competing, more complementary. An open source 
clone is still dependent on the original for direction, but has a 
place for those that require open source all the way. Would that 
effort be better directed to R3? That depends on what is driving 
the developer behind Boron.

(which, by the way is a far less elegant name than Orca)

Borat is better

Sure, but ORCA was triple-overloaded, including another language

For people reading this, that might not know. There was a R3-Alpha 
AltME world running from june 2007 with lots of discussion incl. 
many well known REBOL developers. The chat take up more than 9 MB 
of disk space. Activity died out early this year, and some of it 
continued in R3 chat.

And the reason was??

The reason for it dying out? Carl created R3 chat and moved there. 
Many didn't follow, I guess.

And the other reason was .. that Carl didn't actually turn up much 
in r3alpha world

I can only speak for myself. I found lots of the discussion in R3-Alpha 
good and giving, but I also found the actual progress unstructured. 
I saw it like building a very tall building (like a skyscraper), 
where you work on all stores at the same time. I prefer to start 
from the ground, make every store solid and finished before moving 
on to the next store.

The reason was that AltME didn't turn out to be a good tool for having 
a focused development discussion. Add more than 5 people and it degenerated 
into useless flamewars. This is why a separate R3 world was created 
with just 5 people in it, until we could get to the point of creating 
a development communications infrastructure that would be able to 
handle more developers. That was R3 chat (formerly known as DevBase) 
and CureCode (formerly planned as BugBase, but implemented by a third-party 
instead).

In January of 2008 (more or less, maybe as early as Nov 2007) we 
restarted the project. Except for some port model stuff, everything 
we've done on R3 has been done since then. That is why we say that 
R3 has only taken 2 years so far.