World: r3wp

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.

yes, they still base upon what is awailable, so extending the bloat, 
praying connection to internet and speed of our devices is fast to 
work with what they deliver ....

Hi RayA and Welcome. 


I am a new to AltMe too. I think you are right about the evolution 
of the web. The Desktop OS has become an application in itself (IMHO). 
It's the focus of so much angst, controversy and complication. (Nailing 
my personal colours to post here: I declare myself a BSD UNIX type. 
I can still install the latest version in much less than 100MB of 
HD space and 32MB ram and 100Mhz CPU. In fact I run it on an old 
Toshiba laptop with that spec and get real work done)


I think, in principle, DOS was my idea of a good OS (I know, I know...) 
It was small, fast a stable. Yes - lockups were common when pushed, 
but I found it was the application that crashed rather than DOS itself. 
Ok. back in the world of the 21st Century, an OS need many many times 
the resources of DOS just to get itself booted. But basically, all 
I want from the OS is to let the applications get on with the job 
in hand.


What attracts me to Rebol is that it is clean and lightweight. Designed 
by a man who I respect as a Computer Scientist. (And, of course, 
the Rebol community, which collectively one might say is a "killer 
app" too). It's very productive and I'm building internal information 
systems with it.  I've got a few ideas to build my own apps outside 
of work, that is an exciting prospect for the future. 


I keep trying other frameworks/languges and over the last six years 
or so I've lost the "Rebol way" and strayed from the one true path! 
I do find myself coming back to Rebol as I run into more library 
conflict/dependency/blot features of some of the other languages 
I used. Maybe I'm getting impatient of complicated technology now 
I'm older. I just get tired of having to search the internet for 
the latest whatever.so.1 lib, or what have you. I'm making a general 
point here BTW - I know there are some very good language implimentations 
out there.


I don't know what the next killer app will be, but I do think there 
is a place for a machine "Powered by REBOL" which boots in a few 
seconds, lets me communicate, write view images, multimedia, code 
my own Rebol apps from a set of built in services, oh and the battery 
lasts for days - not hours!
It would have to display HTML too (legacy web :-))


So there you go, a bit of a rant from an old geezer technologist 
. Now where's me 8" floppies I need to boot that PDP-11?

blot = bloat

RayA: <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.>
They announced how yesterday:
http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/

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?
 


Petr already covered the basics (Thanks for doing that Petr!), so 
I'll just chime in with opinions. 


I've been using REBOL since 2001. No tool is perfect, and REBOL is 
no exception, but there are only a few things I think it really isn't 
suited for even in its current form. It was not designed for programming 
in the large, but that's a benefit as much as a drawback, until you 
start building larger systems. IME, REBOL does require a different 
mindset if you want to get the most out of it. You can write code 
as you would in many other languages, but you won't see the big benefits 
REBOL offers if you do. It's still a good tool, even used that way.


The docs and tools you asked about don't exist in official form, 
but there are a lot of "pieces" in the community. I'm working on 
something now that has those same goals.

Rebol does require a different mindset if you want to get the most 
out of it


It's what I call the Zen of Rebol. I think it explains why it's taken 
me years to really "get it". I'm still learning of course. In a way, 
I wish I'd not had a backgound in procedural languages before Rebol.

I find myself changing the mindset with REBOL every few years, because 
for a long time I was afraid of for example, using PARSE. PARSE is 
so central and important that it can change the way you work with 
REBOL, if you have stayed away from it. I had the same experience 
when starting to use the SDK and when starting to do networking stuff 
in REBOL to let scripts communicate with eachother.


It's not just a new set of ideas that turn up that lets me add to 
existing scripts, but doing the same scripts in entirely different 
ways. I feel I know about 30-40% of REBOL. :-) It's so damn deep.

I'm still afraid of ports and the event system. :-)

Yes, I can only swim so deep before I run out of air :-)


I read a snippet of code related to the system object and think, 
Wow! I didn't even know that existed.

As you say, Parse itself is such a powerful thing. What I find inspirational 
is to sit down in front of the console and just explore ideas.

REBOL is like a little, magic and very deep lake high up in the mountains. 
It doesn't look much on the surface, but you'll be surprised, again 
and again.


It's a good exercise (maybe not for the totally newbie) to read some 
of the scripts, Carl has produced. They can be found e.g. in the 
Library. You find things like this one, that I trampled over in his 
color-code.r script:

set [value new] load/next str

load/next ... !!?? cute! :-)

to not speak only in superlatives, there are also some darker corners 
though. One of them being REBOL's isolation. There is nearly none 
linkage to external technologies. The reason is, that so far /library 
interface is imo "weak", and commercial. While with most other languages 
you will find links to things like non-odbc, direct db drivers, via 
libraries, or wrappers to some other libraries, such things are nearly 
non-existant with REBOL, not to mention stuff like ActiveX (COM) 
integration etc.

Thanks everyone for your prompt and honest comments.


Why did I join this community? The primary reason is to be part of 
a small, smart and passionate group who think differently, which 
when combined with REBOL is a very powerful combination. Therefore 
it would seem that focusing the resources of the community on a "killer" 
application leveraging REBOL3 would increase the chance of REBOL 
becoming main stream, and as a side effect possibly allow part time 
REBOL developers to become full time REBOL developers. As an example, 
think what Ruby on Rails did for Ruby. Wouldn't it be nice to get 
paid to do what you love!


IMO/E I believe it's very important for the application vendors to 
have very close and strong ties with the platform vendor so architectures 
and features can be designed and exist at the correct layer. Also, 
if something needs to be implemented in the application but really 
belongs in the platform, it can be done in a way that enables that 
feature to be migrated in the future with minimal impact and extra 
work. This seems to fit with REBOL's history of improving based on 
experience.


I'd like to think it's possible to build great applications in 3 
months, with new releases every three months as required based on 
requirements, so I don't have the time (and maybe not even the ability) 
to spend years learning REBOL. I'd also argue that for a company 
to be successful, it needs a small team to have a number of diverse 
skills which is focused on delivering the product. I mentioned when 
I first signed on that I would be interested to meet REBOL gurus 
who are in Northern California and see what happens when interesting 
(or not) people get together. Sorry for the length of this post and 
thanks for listening.

About dialects: You may not know what it is, so I'll give a brief 
real example of what I did, when adding a dialect to my database 
system. It does 3 different database operations, the details don't 
matter, but here goes:

lock-state: db/release locker-id current-object
set [lock-state current-object] db/add-object locker-id
if all ['locked-by-me = lock-state object? current-object] [
  current-object: db/advance locker-id current-object
]


This is RPC based, which means I call specific functions in the database 
over the network, pass parameters, get stuff back in return and maintain 
database environment variables. This is how you do it traditionally.

Now with a dialect, you can say something like this:

do-database [release add advance]


As you can see, it's an incredible code reduction. Same 3 operations. 
A part of it is of course that database environment variables are 
maintained internally and are not really a part of the dialect, which 
further reduces code. But I consider it a side effect of dialecting 
and makes it easier to design a uniform way of talking to the database.

Now which method would you expose to a third party developer? :-)

Henrik - in traditional environment, you could cover it with functions 
db_release(), db_add(), db_advance() :-)

Pekr, the functions would have specific and different input parameters. 
That's not required here. For example above, the 'add word, adds 
an object to the database. The 'advance word advances the same object 
to the next stage (hard to explain), but I don't have to pass the 
object again, since the dialect parser is not finished with parsing 
and keeps the variables in the air automatically.


Besides, do-database is only 1 network operation. The traditional 
one requires 3.

Why did I join this community? The primary reason is to be part of 
a small, smart and passionate group who think differently,
 -- Then you're in the right place. :-)


I love this community; it reminds me of the old MSBASIC forums on 
CompuServe, before the rise of VB.


I'm in Southwest Idaho, but have a good friend in the Bay area who 
thinks REBOL is cool, though he doesn't use it (yet).


And, yes, there are some dark corners in REBOL, and things I'd like 
to see change. It's hard to complain, though, because *almost* everything 
I'd like to change I *could* change if I really wanted to.

An important aspect of dialects, for me, is that they *don't* look 
like a series of function calls; there is often "implied state" which 
I think is powerful, but messes you up if you think in terms of functional 
programming.

Since REBOL requires a programmer to "think differently", in general 
what type of person, skill set, and/or background is required for 
a person to be a good REBOL programmer?

you must be patient, definitely, particularly when learning PARSE. 
You must be willing to dive into how figuring out how REBOL works

you must accept that it does certain things differently, because 
there is usually a reason to why it does things differently. Some 
people won't accept this, and they won't figure out the true strengths 
of REBOL and go back to other languages.

RayA; I'm of two minds on this one.  I'm attempting to show construction 
site bosses 

how to be 'good' REBOL programmers.  Very simple, data driven code 
sequences.

If you want to be a 'good REBOL' programmer, hang out here and watch 
for posts

from the likes of Anton, Henrik, Gregg, Ashley, well...most of the 
players here.


But a 'good' REBOL programmer can be anyone, in my humble opinion.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not the "best" programmer (hopefully 
I have other strengths ;-) ), but I'm looking for different and better 
ways to solve problems and build applications. Therefore, would a 
programmer with a computer science background with NON procedural 
languages like Lisp or ML be more likely to "grok" and appreciate 
REBOL? Would it make sense to "hire" a young/new programmer out of 
college and get them involved with REBOL early so they have less 
"bad habits" to unlearn? Are any schools teaching their students 
REBOL? I appreciate the help and opinions of the group.

knowing PHP already did not help me in learning REBOL