AltME groups: search

Than we have the product level, that's what's visible and keeps the 
fire burning. Spitting out cool applications in a fast rate is key. 
I see several markets to address: B2B tools, mostly more effort to 
develop but long lasting and big money. Consumer or Internet market 
applications. More low cost but high volume stuff.

Regarding the crowd funding idea, yes, it's appealing. The promise 
would be: You get a complete vertical technology stack to fund your 
next company or app on.

When I first talked with Carl at length about Rebol in 1997, his 
reason for creating Rebol was because he had learned and used so 
many languages, but they all fell short of his definition of a "perfect" 
language.  He liked Lisp and Smalltalk, but there were issues with 
them as well.  Rebol was his attempt at filling in the holes and 
creating a multi-purpose language that made simple things simple 
to do, while still allowing complex things to be possible.  (I'm 
going back in my memory 16 years here, so I hope Carl forgives me 
if I left something out.)

Because of the above, I can't imagine he wouldn't want to see any 
Rebol-like language to succeed as long as they held true to his vision 
of creating a language that made simple things simple to do, while 
allowing complex things to be possible - with efficiency and cleanness 
of design.

there are hundreds of C derived languages, its not that big a deal 
for REBOL to have only a handfull active derivatives.  really, its 
a good thing.

The beauty of freedom from C on all platforms cross-platform, relative 
speed => Red

The flexibility of REBOL to the maximum, remember Red will be a Reduced 
REBOL dialect => R3

Remember Red will be a Reduced REBOL dialect

 That is not true anymore since a while (almost since last summer).

I'm not sure how to incorporate that in the code without having it 
dominate the example. Besides the other examples simply state that 
you need a specific rebol version to use them

fixed a couple of typos now, but I think I'll still only post a version 
note at the bottom like in the other scripts...

I like the idea of a cookbook entry to check on versions. It could 
be expanded to check on OS and other things (what system is this 
script running on?)

I would probably like to see a cookbook example on some kind of error 
handling/redirecting to file or a nice popup window. I've experienced 
terrified users that call me about "that white text window with cryptic 
messages in it" that crop up on fatal bugs.

I'm going to do a last check on my panes example and then submit 
it to Carl. Haven't done any changes to it.

I've created a new draft for a cookbook tutorial for creating a set 
of configuration loading and storing tools: http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/configurationtools.html

It's a bit long though, but tell me what you think

Nice, Henrik!


I do that sort of stuff all the time, and I am sure others do too. 
So to have it as a single item is a good thing.


One small point -- your way of extending the existing object works 
only for single-level values....I often have configuration objects 
that have sub-objects. A field added to a sub-object would be missed 
by your code.  Take a look at:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=extend-an-object.r
Which was created for this sort of purpose.

sunanda, I've decided to leave recursive upgrading as an excersize 
to the reader and just made a few notes on it ;-) I must move on 
with the other tutorial now

where config-file hold the config values as a block. If it's stored 
as an object, you can use 'third to have the block.

Henrik, I'm getting a 403 Forbidden error from your link...

Henrik, it's nice, but I think the person who looks at a cookbook 
example doesn't necessarily have the skills to do the exercises to 
complete those parts left to the reader.   I'd prefer complete examples 
rather than leaving something up to the reader.

well, I can remove them and make a part 2 tutorial? such as it is 
now, the code is pretty usable, I think. But it's far from perfect 
in terms of capability, so do we want perfect code across a few examples 
or just this one tutorial?

I've set up mediawiki at http://compkarori.com/rebolwiki/index.php/Main_Page
and will see how it goes.

Currently there's a sql error on updating or creating a page, but 
you can ignore that it seems as the page changes are made.

a little suggestion.


the current cookbook page at , http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/, needs 
to have better tagging for sorting and searching purposes.

Example. An example can be tag to 'view', 'cgi', 'ios'


Or, we can break it up into 'logical chapters in a book'. Example

1. Part I. Rebol Basics
2. Part II. Advanced Rebol
3. Part III. /View Basics
4. Part IV. /View Styles
5. Part V. /IOS
6. List of Examples

rebol.org library already have tagging for the scripts.


Both in terms of levels ["Beginner" "Intermediate" "Advanced"] as 
well as the domain ["cgi" "gui"] etc...


Perhaps there is a way to feed the cookbook examples into rebol.org 
and let the Library be the holding place for future cookbook examples.


There are '3 major' rebol sites (those with rebol in the domain). 
And they are rebol.com, rebol.net, rebol.org.

It is not incredibly clear whether certain docs should be in .org 
or .net. 


Other suggestion to consider is how can we leverage off works done 
in various sites and avoid duplication. Why not let rebol.org be 
the host for cookbooks as well?


I would think new comers will prefer to find both cookbook examples 
and other contributed scripts all in one location. Rebol.org also 
lets you search the mailing list.

REBOL.org also hosts articles -- and you can tag those for anything 
you want.  Might be a solution:
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/art-index.r

{so an article  could be tagged as [cookbook advanced ios] etc)

If I built a little page to create cookbook entries in wiki style, 
would you use it? It could be useful to have cookbook entries fixed 
quickly this way as I'm too pressed for time to release my tutorials.

Henrik --- One question: how good is the SEO on your site? Little 
point putting cookbook entries where they are hard for the world 
to find.


One idea: why not write a wiki-formatting to HTML function (you'll 
need it anyway) and donate it to the Library ?.....

.... REBOL.org can then accept cookbook entries and other articles 
in wiki format --- we already accept all other major formats: MakeDoc, 
NicomDoc, eText etc.  And we do have good SEO.

sunanda: they are not meant to be published on my site, I simply 
wanted to approve them here before handing them to Carl (which I 
actually have, but he hasn't responded other than "Cool!", but hasn't 
done anything :-)).


I was thinking about a very simple extension to webserv.r which simply 
submits a form to a modified makedoc2.r processor, which generates 
a page, sectioned so that you can edit small parts of it.

my basic thinking is that proper documentation is only possible through 
a wiki

Tom started this group with a reference to
http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/requests.html

It's a set of outstanding requests for cookbook entries -- ie examples 
that people would like to see.

As he says.some have been done independently of the request, and 
published on the REBOLn Altmes or the Mailing List.

It'd be a great collective community New Year's resolution to clear 
some of the cookbook request by the end of the month (and that leaves 
plenty of time to enter the competition too)

the "styles" example found in our %vid-usage.r at rebol.org locks 
up any Rebol that I have ( I only go back a few versions ) without 
halt and unview ... if this is not a cookbook kind of issue, perhaps 
I should post the note elsewhere ... I don't see the problem yet 
( it has been a very long day + a blizzard in Minneapolis)

I don't need such a tool

I'm using tyhe dialect because I wouyld not be able to do such a 
thing in Macromedia programs

As far as I remember, file on http://oldes.multimedia.cz/swf/isn't 
actual?!

IMO it needs mainly needs short route to first swf - eg. a) unpack 
make-swf.zip  in catalog ... b) write [code] - save it as first.rswf 
...... - there was always a problem to start again using it :)

As for now, I now AS quite well :) _IMO_ there is a need to simply 
"jump-in" how-to - examples are good, but (IMO) it lacks _short_ 
 "first swf" guide.

IIRC some script in the library says there are more options, buffer-size 
and something. rebol can output nearly gzip, but read only a specific 
version.

just tried to make a helpfull suggestion. did not want to critisize.

Was just checking it a little bit, and it looks that the mtasc is 
pretty complicated. First action script I wanted to compile using 
mtasc was not compiled successfully:) The biggest difference is, 
that the mtasc is only ActionScript compiler, but in my dialect one 
can compile everything (shapes, sprites, images, sound). You must 
use swfmill or how they call it to compile such a things (and it's 
using XML so I thing it's not much useful for making complete application 
in it (as I do).

The dialect file have been updated a little bit, use: do http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rswf/rswf_latest.r

Thanks, the dialect file updatet a little bit again and there are 
3 new (flash8) examples

I already posted it to rebcode group as it's rebcode which allowed 
me to this, but will like to post it here as well, because the main 
reason was to improve the Rebol/Flash dialect again....

Maybe you know that in Flash you can have embedded outlined fonts 
(independend on system) Most of the font's looks blury if you use 
them as outlines so you must use special fonts to get non blured 
pixel precision fonts. I was using some font editor just to see, 
that it's pretty difficult to make such a font so I decided it would 
be good to have possibility to make such a font just in any graphic 
editor - as a bitmap and comnvert it to pixels. Here is the result:


do http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/projects/font-tools/latest/test.r

maybe I could hack the trutype spac to have possibility to save the 
font as a TTF as well

Oldes, I'm still amazed at this dialect and the sites you have created. 
I wonder if you have a list of the commands that are being used. 
I've been going through the examples to try to figure out what does 
what but it seems like a list would be faster. Thanks.

Volker, I've just begun to really get into the dialect so I can't 
comment on how one "translates" the actionscript into it, however, 
the actionscript pdf is at least a start into trying to figure out 
the examples.

At this point, I am taking one of the examples from the flash actionscript 
pdf and rework it into the dialect form. Before I had this documentation 
I was just guessing at the whole process.

I see. What I mean is taking an actionscript example and converting 
it to your dialect. Right now I'm trying to make a simple "slideshow" 
with fades and I found some actionscript examples. That being said, 
just you saying that the DoAction[] is somewhat like Actionscript 
takes some mystery out of the process.

Oldes, making some progress thanks to your help. There is one example 
with soem embedded rebol code (the arc example). Is there a way to 
have rebol do some processing then expose what it does to flash? 
I want to write a function in rebol to take a string and create a 
block of characters which I then want to pass to flash. 

For example, I can hardcode a_block: ["h" "e" "l" "l" "o"] but I 
would rather send the string "hello" to a function and have it generate 
that block then pass it to flash. It seems that what I do within 
a "rebol [ ]" block is hidden from flash.

First of all, I must say, that there are two main parts of the dialect, 
one which are related to making shapes and sprites in the timelines 
(processed by rswf/tag-rules) and actions (in doAction and DoInitAction 
tags and as a part of Actions subtag in placing sprites and in button 
events) - This is processed by rswf/actions-parser

but in Actions you can use:  now: rebol [ rejoin [ a_block " " now]]

Worked great! Is there any way to pass AS vars to a rebol block? 
You must think I'm crazy but this is an amazing piece of coding and 
I am determined to use it. I'm curious but when you created your 
work for the incredible web pages you've done, did you make libraries 
or are they basically one large script?

I'm going to start a new website project and am excited about designing 
some stuff. If I could only make the cool things you do...

As for my passing VARS to AS, I see now that I'll have to write something 
in AS completely if I want to accomplish what I thought would be 
a neat function.

Oldes, do you have an eample that could create and embed a swf on 
the fly  ie: via cgi?

hm, it's not so funny, they were really watching atomic explosion. 
And probably were not so stupid, just the leaders who forced them 
do such a experiments.

I got to see a demo of this product : www.Lazlosystems.com which 
is a language that spews out both Flash and JavaScript. (and they 
look the same).

james: the elasticboy is not my flash file! it's just a test if it's 
possible to download movie from other domain.

And you must have a Flex Builder which has 112MB = must be all the 
industrial standards so huge?

Interesting........................there is a look to photos taken 
in Europe (mostly East Europe) which is really noticeable in these 
photos.


Like someone set up one very big light, and had 10 minutes to shoot 
everything…very odd.  They did this in America about 30 years ago.

there is still a lot of things to do (for example usage of Func2 
action tag is not finished yet, but this is the version of the dialect 
I used to compile the flash site above and I was also able to compile 
all the old examples (except one) Some of them with a little code 
changes.

I still have a lot of things to imrove on my Flash compiler.. I don't 
want to play with some XML toy which can need ages to be available 
on so many computers as Flash is now

Anyway.. the main reason to rewrite the actions parser was, that 
everything was hardcoded, now it first translates actions into instructions, 
which are compiled on second pass... so it's now possible to better 
dubug the compilers results... for example:

do http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rswf/rswf_latest.r
>> acompiler/translate [a: 1 + 2 + b]
== [["a" 1 2 aAdd "b" aGetVariable aAdd aSetVariable]]
>> compile-actions [a: 1 + 2 + b]
== #{960D0000610007010000000702000000479603000062001C471D}

>> rswf/parse-ActionRecord compile-actions [a: 1 + 2 + b]
     aPush ["a" 1 2]
     aAdd2 #{47}
     aPush ["b"]
     aGetVariable #{1C}
     aAdd2 #{47}
     aSetVariable #{1D}

I would like to create something like a rebol/flash vid in a future. 
and what I can say is, that I don't like the visual IDE too much 
for coding. All the actions on different frames and in different 
sprites.

Oldes' dialect  is something I always wanted to study, but never 
managed. Adobe's products are very interesting as well to study, 
so I delved more time in learning actionscript directly. Next on 
my list is Flex. But Oldes' dialect is a feat on itself.

You can code and compile on all platforms. If you want the official 
Builder (based on Eclipse, or a an Eclipse plug-in),  then you're 
tied to Windows or the Mac.

Petr: It's been a goal of mine to find a place for Rebol/Flash within 
QM.

I'm glad Oldes still works on this Flash project, I'm sure I'll use 
it in a near future to create cool photo templates :-)

and one more example how to extend existing class to make a new one: 
http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rswf/example/swf8-draggablecliphandler

There is virtually no new scripts posted on rebol.org, it is a sign 
that everyone expects R3

good Rebolers don't wait

 ... well said. There's a lot of juice left in R2. I'll personally 
 be using it at least for 12-18 months more for commercial projects. 
 Full time.

Oldes.. i think your work is great, but where's the advantage over 
using a Flash IDE?

And I have Import-swf command in the dialect (not documented yet 
as I still change it a little bit). I'm using it to include large 
animations made in IDE. As I have a caching mechanism already, I 
can include it in my dialect and control it in miliseconds, don't 
have to wait many seconds to compile all the animation in the IDE 
every time when I change a bit of a code.

and one more reason - to hack a default Flash gui components is for 
me much more difficult than make my own from scratch

Oldes, is there something special about the getURL command. I have 
a function in "doAction" and it clearly gets to it as the cmsg is 
displayed, but I can't get it to actually go to another URL. My flash 
settings are good because your "horse" link works. Any ideas? Thanks,

on server it should not be a problem

Oldes, yes, I did figure out that it works perfectly under 6 and 
kinda under 8. That took a while until I noticed that your slideshow 
was created under 6. Thanks.

I have a question... I use this code patern quite often now:
if something = undefined [something: defaultValue]
Don't you know some better way how to write it?

Oldes, do you have a MXML dialect?

Using rebol to call mxmlc.exe and deliver it some Rebol generated 
xml gives you a Flash 9 .swf file all set to go.. kinda cool.

I smell a Kommonwealth Flex IDE by the middle of next week ;)

Using Adobe Air, Flex code doubles as a desktop app as well, complete 
with it's own SQLite DB.

The Flex framework is a free, open source development framework for 
quickly building RIAs. These RIAs can run on Adobe Flash Player runtime 
in the browser or Adobe AIR can be used to deliver them to the desktop. 
The Flex 3 SDK beta includes all of the required tools from the Adobe 
AIR SDK.

er.. one more.. 

At a high level, Adobe AIR accomplishes this by taking the world-class 
WebKit browser engine (most notably used in Safari), and wrapping 
it alongside Flash and PDF technologies, as a cohesive desktop runtime.

I don't have MXML dialect and don't like MXML and don't like Flash 
default components... sorry, but If I want a chackbox. I really don't 
need 168kB of compressed SWF code.

Well, creating a swf with a single checkbox is rather impractical... 
but all the components can be skinned using CSS (also cool).. so 
you can build things like this... 
http://scalenine.com/themes/wmp11/wmp11.html
or this
http://fleksray.org/skins/edding/Edding.html

I think Terry should get a sneak peak.  He appears to be, from the 
work he publicly shares with us, one of the most diverse Rebolers 
in the group.  I would think his input would be of value.  That's 
all I will say as well  ;-)

If I can throw my two cents here. Terry is right to complain, because 
you can feel he cares, it's not destructive criticism. Pekr is saying 
he's a realist, but to me he sounds more like a dreamer (no offense).Flash 
is a Virtual Machine that lives in the browser. Rebol is a VM that 
lives on several OSes. Flash VM is present on 99% of the browsers. 
Rebol VM is not present  on browsers (plugin doesn't count because 
last time I tried it wouldn't install, and last version is more than 
a year old), and it is present on OSes of a small number of creative 
developers and hobbyists. If I had to develop a commercial app for 
the web, Flash and Flex give me extensive documentation, and a whole 
framework. Rebol can't compete with Adobe, and should not. Last week, 
I developed a GUI in Rebol and Rebgui that would have taken me four 
times longer in any other graphical toolkit, and I had a knack at 
it. But this app is for internal use. Rebol is a great language, 
and I would like to see it evolve as a computer language, not as 
a throw it all in kind of gizmo. It should go Open Source, because 
RT doesn't have the means to provide versions for all platforms. 
Where is the rebol for NetBSD? Last version is 2001. If RT hasn't 
the resources, let the developers do it. I want to run rebol on an 
internet tablet. I had wanted to run rebol on a palm (not anymore 
because Palm is deas, sort of). But the Nokia tablet run debian linux. 
There is no reason for the unabailability of rebol. It is just a 
matter of building it and packaging it. Who has the time for this? 
Plenty of people, they're just not at RT, because there people are 
busy with more important things (like developing the product).

flash is on zero browsers until installed...I've set up machines 
at work for guys in the firehouse to use. Every computer there gathers 
so much adware/spyware/viruses that I can never keep up cleaning 
them. I've had to re-install windows so many times and each time 
I have to re-install the latest flash player. I resorted to setting 
up puppy linux and running off a bootable cd..(with the typical complaints 
about it not being windows) Anyway...rebol plug-in is easire to download 
than flash so what's the bigdeal. I install active-x controls all 
the time when I find a site that interests me and needs the control.

Your other complaints are to be addressed with R3. You want to run 
it on a tablet, great, you will be able to port it yourself.

To make a distribution, you need to be able to do both.

The main problem of Rebol is the business model. I've seen RT struggle 
with this since the first versions, I don't have a solution, I don't 
know how you make money with open source, but some people do.

A brief description of R# components and how the "hybrid-open-source 
model" will work: http://www.rebol.com/docs3/architecture.html

yeah, a little

Host Environment - Open: The environment defines an operating system 
abstraction layer (OSAL) that can be ported to a wide range of systems, 
including desktop systems, set-top boxes, mobile devices, and cell 
phones. This approach gives developers a way to run and improve REBOL 
on their specific target platforms.
-from same document

Oldes, would it be possible to have a version running with /core 
?

Will: I'm guessing that you meant a version running with /core under 
OS X.

Will: When I tried to load the latest version of RWSF under Mac OS 
X it failed as it calls a Windows DLL.

Keep on your project Oldes! That's a very good one. As Pekr mentioned, 
made with Rebol, run with Adobe. That means Rebol may not even need 
a plugin eventually. And for the ones who think alternative solutions 
are not for them, ask yourself what you're doing here! You're at 
the wrong place! Go to MacDo and Pizza Hut, install Vista and don't 
forget to buy an iPhone!

(The old group was a bit to OT for web IMHO)

bleh - just found out can't connect a VOIP phone to Skype directly 
from the router.

I'm going to have to check into all those other possibilities. It's 
a confusing new area, VOIP, for a beginner.

I just use a skype phone .. usb to PC which controls the skype interface.

What is the solution for that?  I would like to have a wireless Skype 
phone in my office?  What is the best one?

I will use Skype for now, until later I can augment that with a real 
VOIP phone.