AltME groups: search

Is there any specific need to make View 1.3.50 running under Linux:
- It runs right while clicking the icon
- it fails to run from a terminal:
	./rebol
	** User Error: REBOL: Cannot connect to X server
	** Near: size-text self

I mean - if your server does not have X-Win installed, then you have 
to use Core

50mb and includes.. 


XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links 
web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US 
English), a word-processor (FLwriter), three editors (Beaver, Vim, 
and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and 
xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, 
IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, 
PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript 
printer support, NFS, Fluxbox window manager, games, system monitoring 
apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, 
some wireless support.

has anyone any experience, of how to configure 'sendmail, to allow 
sending email from various domains? I run cgi script, I want to send 
email from particular domain (virtual host on my server - I host 
several domains), but it always goes away as one concrete domain. 
I have suspiccion I should somehow turn off email masquarading, but 
dunno how :-)

Take a look at http://www.johnsons-web.com/cgi-bin/test.r.This is 
very bizarre! If you use netscape, you will see the entire usage 
message from rebol displayed prior to the mime-type header. If you 
use IE, it is likely that some but not all of these effects will 
be obfuscated, but you should be able

to see the entire output if you view the source. The sources from 
the script is being sent from a windows computer to a linux server. 
Now, if

I use a FTP client like WS_FTP which as a "ascii" mode, it automatically 
converts line enders to unix style, and this problem does not occur.

What version of rebol are you using (on server and local) ? Could 
be one of those cgi quirks that were in older releases.

I do not believe that 'rebol on the linux server is the latest. I 
am using 2.5.6.3.1 (for windows) on this machine. I think I've got 
the latest for linux on my main workstation, but it is not available 
right now....

Chris: from what I see, it does not. Either the file has to be transfered 
and saved on the server with unix-style line enders or -q has to 
be there to make it work for me. Time will tell. Unfortunately I 
don't have a linux machine to download and compare.... Can you say 
"Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle"? :-) Anway, what works, works. 
I'll post more on this subject when I actually get back to programming. 
thanks.

you need to run a web server .. and just opening tcp://:80 won't 
do it.

I wonder when Dockimbel is going to release his Cheyenne web server 
... it was slated for a Dec 04 release according to his website.

I was thinking more of a simple mail server that only accepts mail 
for one's own domain.  In that case, I wouldn't need to do any mail 
forwarding. But I guess I still need to do a DNS lookup to confirm 
that the server sending mail is who they claim to be.

(local machine)

and it returns:

make object! [
    server-software: none
    server-name: none
    gateway-interface: none
    server-protocol: none
    server-port: none
    request-method: none
    path-info: none
    path-translated: none
    script-name: none
    query-string: none
    remote-host: none
    remote-addr: none
    auth-type: none
    remote-user: none
    remote-ident: none
    Content-Type: none
    content-length: none
    other-headers: []
]

HELP w/ web rebol associations AND Rebol-View.
Here is the story..


On my PC, I have View pointing to an index.r file on my web server.
Everything is cool.

When I open up Rebol-View and traverse to my index.r on the server..
it works.


Now on the same server, I change the IIS-Web associations so that 
I can do rebol CGI.
I create a 'main.r' in some virtual directory on the server.
Web-ing to this http.//myserver/mydir/main.r   works GREAT!
CGI is working.


However, when I now open up Rebol-View on my local PC and traverse 
to my index.r which is
on the server.. I get an error.


The problem is that before.. rebol-view was requesting a file-download 
and the server sends it.

Now since IIS is doing '*.r' CGI, when rebol-view requests for the 
index.r download.. the server is processing the request
and attempting to send back html.. not a rebol file.


Is there any way of fixing this other than..

* changing the CGI association from '*.r' to something else  (ie. 
'*.rr')

* changing all my view-apps on the server from '*.r' to something 
else   (ie. '*.rr')
??

best to change the association on IIS, so you don't accidently have 
a desktop script or browser plugin script execute on the server. 
you'll sleep better :-)

hrm. I get weird behavior trying to run a cgi.

Here's the code:

#!/usr/local/bin/rebol -c

REBOL [
	Title: "Server Time"
]

print "content-type: text/html^/"
print [<HTML><BODY>]
print ["Date/time is:" now]
print [</BODY></HTML>]


I get an Internal Server Error result in the browser, and here's 
the output in my error_log:


[Sat May 28 16:21:38 2005] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] *** Boot Error 
951: \r

[Sat May 28 16:21:38 2005] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Premature end 
of script headers: time.r


If I run if with 'rebol time.r', it clears the screen and then displays 
this:

content-type: text/html

<HTML> <BODY>
Date/time is: 28-May-2005/16:24:42-7:00
</BODY> </HTML>
Aborted

What the heck am I doing wrong?

/view wants to connect to x and errors out without. and cgi usually 
has no DISPLAY set (or no X on server at all).

I am trying to sort out what the POST data should look like coming 
to a Rebol web server from a browser after someone hits submit.

A second source of information are the environment-vars passed by 
the server. They are in system/options/cgi.  'decode-multipart-form 
needs system/options/cgi/content-type. There youself can look what 
the datas are too. if it is "multipart/form-data", use 'decode-multipart-form. 
i don't know the other types, just send a script a form and dump 
it.

Steve, now i read your question again, you are writing a complete 
web-server? Why not looking at one available? Patch %webserv.r to 
probe a bit. It also splits the stuff into system/options/cgi, so 
you can study how to do that. Only problem is with post-data, its 
system/ports/input works a bit different to a real webserver. You 
need to look in /content-length and use a copy/part instead of carls 
loop. and sometimes to set the right port-modes by hand IIRC.

I ´d like to have a CGI script to filter my emails at server. My 
ISP uses Cpanel that gives the possibility of use this to send emails 
to file:  |/home/user/cgi-bin/myfilter.cgi. The thing all I get is 
the whole content of each email appended to the CGI script. Anyone 
could help me?

Hello, I finally get FastCGI with rebol/cmd with Lite Speed Web Server, 
but not with Apache.

With Apache 2.x (normal CGI), we have: make object! [ 
	server-software: "Apache/2.0.54 (Fedora)" 
	server-name: "localhost" 
	gateway-interface: "CGI/1.1" 
	server-protocol: "HTTP/1.1" 
	server-port: "80" 
	request-method: "GET" 
	path-info: "/sample01.rhtml" 
	path-translated: "/var/www/html/sample01.rhtml" 
	script-name: "/cgi-bin/magic.cgi" 
	query-string: "" 
	remote-host: none 
	remote-addr: "127.0.0.1" 
	auth-type: none 
	remote-user: none 
	remote-ident: none 
	Content-Type: none 
	content-length: none 
	other-headers: [
		"HTTP_HOST" "localhost" 

  "HTTP_USER_AGENT" {Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) 
  Gecko/20050720 Fedora/1.0.6-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.6} 

  "HTTP_ACCEPT" {text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5} 
		"HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE" "en-us,en;q=0.5" 
		"HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING" "gzip,deflate" 
		"HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET" "ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7" 
		"HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE" "300" 
		"HTTP_CONNECTION" "keep-alive" 
		"HTTP_COOKIE" "PHPSESSID=7f84fd7766f23e1462fed550ecbbfda4"
	] 
]

Hi Pekr, Rebol/Cmd works fine with lighttpd and LiteSpeed Web Servers. 
I configure succesfully those web servers to work with rebol/cmd 
as static server (i did not try as external server but this sould 
work too). But I did not succeed with Apache!

By static I mean the Web Server takes care to create as many VM instances 
as needed within the min and max nb of instances allowed by the web 
master.

You are right. So i will try on Apache Linux. It shoud work as I 
succeeded with both lighttpd and litespeed. By the way, these two 
web server are very good and so easy to configure (specially LiteSpeed)...

prepare your upload with rebol and replace some things server-specific.

  write %dst/cgi/script.r join "#!/here/is/rebol^/" read src/script.r

I'm trying to set up rebol in my new host and I'm coming up with 
"Premature end of script headers" in the error log. "Server error 
500 " shows up in the browser, btw. I'm going through my usual  routine 
of error checking. Does anyone know what the permissions are for 
the cgi-bin directory are to be at. One time, long ago, I had this 
problem and fixed it with chmod. The files themselves are set to 
755.

After all Carl decided to do rebol when he set up a linux-server..

Hello everyone..
I have a CGI problem/question.


I have a Win-apache-rebol server that isn't propagting the cgi info 
properly..
Upon posting.. the query-string is empty.
I am not sure what I am missing..

Details:

page1.rcgi
========================
#!c:\rebol\rebol.exe -cs
rebol []
print "content-type: text/html^/"
print "<html><body>"
print "  <form action='page2.rcgi' method='POST'>"

print "    <input type='text' name='var01' size='16' value='test'>"
print "    <input type='submit' name='go' value='Lookup'>"
print "  </form>"
print "</body></html>"


page2.rcgi
========================
#!c:\rebol\rebol.exe -cs
REBOL [ ]
print "content-type: text/html^/"
print "<html><body>"
print mold system/options/cgi
print "<hr>"
print "</body></html>"



if I .. ( decode-cgi system/options/cgi/query-string ), my vars are 
all undefined.

Also, looking at the 'print mold system/options/cgi' shows   query-string=""

if I change page1 form-action to ... "action='page2.rcgi?x=123"

then the query-string on page2 gets populated with x=123 and the 
value 123 gets assigned to 'x'
when I 'decode-cgi'.

However, my form fields NEVER get populated.
Does anyone have any advice?

John.

ok, now I tried it, Graham. I used Total Commander to copy it over 
ftp there. I got correct user and group permissions, but I had to 
chmod it directly on server to 755

3) I would not put rebol in cgi-bin. If it is there, one can call 
the rebol-exe from the outside, without it doing a string. Never 
tried that, but it may think post-data is console-input. rights should 
be 755, only you can modify, but everyone can read it. the server 
may call it as "somebody else", and so it must be readable for that 
"user"

http://www.cod-okna.cz/cgi-bin/rebolhttp://www.compkarori.com/test.r


The requested URL /cgi-bin/rebol http://www.compkarori.com/test.r
was not found on this server.
Apache/2.0.50 (Fedora) Server at www.cod-okna.cz Port 80

but you could flood server, running hundreds of instances .... keeping 
them in memory for long time ...

Yes, but i could also call hundreds of regular scripts to keep server 
busy. although this way is  easier, i can allocate lots of mem with 
one call.

Graham - my server is far from popular. I think no-one will do Volker's 
like trick. But you might be right, if we teach ppl to simply put 
rebol into cgi-bin dir, and then such "vulnerability" is found, ISPs 
might hate it ....

well, as for my server, I can install rebol regullarly. We just were 
thinking loud here with Graham, if that is good aproach or not to 
have it in cgi-bin, so simply you could run your rebol scripts without 
ISP to even know you are using rebol :-)

Grahams obfuscation-trick should work too, as long as nobody on the 
same server tries to break in.

btw, ct mentioned virtual server for e4.99. Dont know about quality, 
and i see german, do you see english? http://www.netfabrik.de/

Good to know !!

Looking at some log on a server I have to administrate, Im affraid 
to see many request trying to find  some /ebay, /lassalebank, /admin, 
/phpmyadmin pages on the site.
Internet looks more and more like a jungle.

I am running XP on my local computer. Out web host's server is running 
Red Hat Linux.


Which version of core should I use on the host server to run the 
cgi scripts?


If I download the proper Linux core interpreter to my  XP computer, 
and uncompress it using WinZip, will it be corrupted by XP?  How 
do I get a clean version of core to the Linux server?

Hi Graham, I am, of course, using ftp. I'm sending core 042 for Red 
Hat to the server using binary mode.

500 Server Error

A misconfiguration on the server caused a hiccup. Check the server 
logs, fix the problem, then try again. URL: http://www.dayspringpublisher.com/cgi-bin/now.cgi

/home/daysprin/public_html/cgi-bin/now.cgi: Invalid shebang /dayspringpublisher.com/cgi-bin/rebol: 
Does not exist!

shebangs only refer to the local filing system.  They know nothing 
of web servers which are virtual paths for the web server which is 
an application.

And your web server reported the actual path in the 500 server error 
message.

OK, now that cgi is working, I want to make a form that will allow 
people to give their name and email address to be saved in a rebol 
db file on the server for me to download at my convenience. Has anyone 
already done this so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel?

I am trying for first time to setup rebol for cgi on  remote Apache 
web server on Linux.
I am working from WinXP
Site management is done with EnsimPro. Ftp does not yet working.
So what is done up to now:

Uploaded file Rebol from rebol-core-2602042.tar package for Linux 
to cgi-bin directory;

Set permisions to owner read, write, execute and for group and others 
to read, execute;
Test script -> write file read file,

Test script uploaded (throught web broeser by using EnsimPro web 
interface) test script:

#!/var/www/cgi-bin/rebol -cs

REBOL [Title: "CGI Basics"]

print ["Content-type: text/html" newline]

print "Hello!!!"

to cgi-bin directory;
Set the same permisions.


Pointing to the test file I am getting "500 Internal server errror" 
What else could be wrong?


Interesting that I have interpreters directory on this web server 
where are couple files regarding php and perl.
Could it be connected with my problem?

That web server is hosting and I think that I can not access httpd.conf.
Btw  - where it resides?

The web server service providers told/wrote that it is possible to 
run cgi scripts on this server.

I susoect View may be trying to pop-up an installation window......And 
so that appears on the server's console (if any). meanwhile, you 
wait at the end of an Internet connection unable to see anything.

Possible work-around: manually install whatever files View is trying 
to configure?

what about asking server admin to add the library for you? He just 
could unpack it for you from his distro CD/DVD to the location where 
it belongs ....

I asked for mu web service provider to add linux-gate.so.1 to the 
server he did not aprove that he did (actualy I did not get any answer 
yet), but today I found that my test script:

 #!/var/www/cgi-bin/rebview -cs

REBOL [Title: "CGI Basics"]

print ["Content-type: text/html" newline]

print "Heloooooo!!!"

works differently - I am getting following response:

** Near: size-text self

You can check: http://www.jk.serveris.lv/cgi-bin/test

What could it mean?

first guess view may not work without X installed (does not on solaris) 
and there is no good reason to run X on a web server ... and then 
there are all those fiddley fonts

Personaly I do not like M$ as it is monster. ;-)

But in my last and current work I am not responsible on which web 
server to chose and therefore neither for security of web server.

And I am trying to separate my  resposibility and SP responsibility, 
but of course there is cases when they overlaps.

I am just trying to find  as much as possible info about security 
of web servers and it does no matter if it is M$ or not .

My first installations was on IIS 5.0 in intranet - so I relied on 
firewall. The last case is in public internet. 

So I think if there are no possibility to upload danger cgi scripts 
or pass danger code to existing scripts, than from my side I did 
all.

I haven't used rebol much on linux, yet, but the error sounds suspiciously 
like the common mistake of running rebol without X running, as Tom 
said. The linux server you are uploading rebview to may very well 
*not* be running X.  If that is the case, you will have to settle 
with Rebol/Core only.  Do you really need View features ?  I know 
some people found that they missed some image manipulation functions 
from Rebol/View that are not available in Rebol/Core.

size-text: xwindows is client/server. the x-server , that is your 
local computer, which offers to aplications to display things to 
you. And it has some important informations locally, especially the 
fonts (and can cache images and such).

/view needs access to the fonts and so access to a running x-server. 
the x-libs are only an interface to connect to the server. (The xserver-libs 
could be used directly, but well, /view does not do that. Seems to 
be tricky.)
A incomplete sketch how to do it, with no attention to security:

So with /view you need a running x-server, one way to do that  headless 
is vnc.  Can also run on another machine. 

Then you need to tell  rebol where it is, there is an env-var $DISPLAY. 
Which must be set before rebol runs. Did not figure out how to configure 
that. Running a bash-script as cgi, set  $DISPLAY, call the real 
rebol-script should work. And there may be issues with authentification, 
x-windows does not like everyone to connect by default, or the other 
way around, its too easy to make it too open ("xhost + ip"). There 
are more secure ways, but looked more complicated and i never tried. 
All in all i would run such things on windows.

Because I don't know it.

And I whanted to use my blog site as demo for all those good things 
that could be done with Rebol.

But whell - as I undertood I can use it on Linux web server. Anyway 
thanks, Graham, I will check how can I use them.

I'm using the com+ server at present stil as I wasn't able to get 
your script to work.  When I have time, I'll try again.

Yes, that may be a concern as well. I'm running on a virtual server 
so I could change those parameters. Maybe I should investigate some 
type of Rebol client app. instead. Basically, what I'm after is a 
what for my students to send in their homework files that is better 
and smarter than this dropbox solution that they have now. It doesn't 
give them feedback of a successful upload and I end up with files 
upon files of slightly uncategorized uploads.

if you have PHP on the server...you can try SwiftMailer.
http://www.swiftmailer.org/

Ok, I have a question regarding blog.r .  I set it up on a server 
to play with it for a few minutes.  After a couple kinks, I got it 
working with a few tests.   I went to delete the test blogs but found 
they were created under the www-data user and group (this is on a 
linux server) and I do not have writes to delete or modify these 
files.   In the future, is there a way to have the files created 
under a different user / group?

Or is this server / apache config?   I have no admin access to this 
box, so this could cause some annoyances

Hello, I need to send multipart/form-data to a server for uploading 
a file from the console. I've been googling and searching the script 
archive, to no avail. Can anyone help?

Thanks for the help. The recipe from the rebol cookbook show you 
how to upload a file provided the server runs a rebol script too. 
The server I'm uploading a file to doesn't. It expects multipart/form-data. 
Maybe the %cgi.r by Cal Dixon provides a solution. I'll investigate 
further. More hints will be appreciated, as well...

In that ML thread, the request was to handle a multipart upload on 
the server side (in rebol). I need to perform a multipart upload 
on the client side (in rebol). As for the seconde link, unfortunately 
I get "Article x60 is no longer available ". Any idea?

In other words, the rebol script has to send values to a form on 
the server issuing something like that in the header: Content-Type: 
multipart/form-data; boundary=----------6l5Xq9lJYPaaypknAH8Des etc. 
Surely someone has done this before (I hope)...

I don't know if it helps, but I did write a web server stress test 
that did a http upload of hundreds of images in Rebol that year.. 
but the scripts are long lost.

Anyone know the answer to this one? 

I have a cgi script that sends an email out. The problem is that 
I want to send to an address that has the same domain name as the 
website but whose mail server is not located there (It's an Exchange 
Server). Any other address works fine as expected. I think it has 
to do with the mx records but, the weird thing is that if I generate 
an email via php, it goes through. Therefore I'm thinking Rebol can 
do it too. 

I've used set-net  for the smtp server and have set it a different 
server completely but still no go.
And I'm in the process of having the MX records changed.

yes, /rebol/rebol.exe will not be executed by the web server, unless 
it is specifically configured to do so.

I don't need it on my server, was trying to help other guys to not 
feel pressed from ISPs

What I have found to be a problem is accessing MySQL accounts from 
client based rebol scripts. They seem to only allow server based 
access.

I have a rebol view app that I use to acces a MySQL database. I had 
it working  and then ,y ISP decided to add security and no longer 
allow MySQL access unless its a script on the server. Ofcourse they 
did not inform me and it took some time to track down the problem..

it's not execute bit of the dir, and it has not much to do with unix 
permissions, it's web server config. normally, web server will only 
execute things from cgi-bin and not somewhere else.

Maarten, I agree with your observation and you can even scale it 
more.


If you see a web-server as just a request dispatcher to CGIs and 
a fast-answering-machine for user-feedback (pages, forms etc.) you 
just need a small and "simple" one like Cheyenne. The CGIs can be 
distributed to different cores (through the OS) or even to different 
machines (via TCP/IP).

As dispatching requests is most likely much faster than processing 
a request, a single web-server should serve a lot of users and a 
bunch of machines do the processing.

This is the coarse grained multi-process approach.

I am close to autogenerating fastcgi processes, linked with Lighttpd 
configs and generating automagical includes that match the web server 
config  for encap/Pro.

With the avereage memory use fo Rebol < 10Mb you can coompute how 
many users I can concurrently server for complex operations (100-200 
minimum), so every machine I hire can host 500 customers. That means 
that I should earn e0.50 customer to get  a decent margin (roughly).

Uniserve is very nice, I have been using it to prototype/test before 
I upload to actual server.  It broke my heart it was gpl.  BSD is 
very good choice.  Free software should not be restricted, and GPL 
has too many of those.    makedoc/spec is the killer app,  and in 
that intensional programming vein is coursing all the best documentation, 
and REBOL  does a fine job of documenting itself because it is so 
semantic by nature.  To understand how to use a moderately complex 
system like a full-featured web server, it is going to be important 
to capture the thinking of those who wrote the code.  REBOL parsing 
allows all information pertaining to the code to be right there with 
the code,  and a function of  DO -ing anything.  the standard documentation 
scheme should follow how REBOL [] headers work, and simply have the 
makedoc embedded within the scripts.

Well, you said "To understand how to use a moderately complex system 
like a full-featured web server, it is going to be important to capture 
the thinking of those who wrote the code.". and then you want to 
force your users not to look at it?

Hi .... with recent Rebcode releases, we can see that internally 
new Core is marked as 2.7 and View is marked as 1.4 Is it just working 
"title" or will those products be marked as that? And if so, can 
we know, what other changes will go for 1.4 View release target? 
Will there be any AGG fixes/additions (to support SVG RebGUI progress), 
or even VID changes? I still think, that VID is missing few fine 
styles as tab, group-box, better list as was introduced on IOS Developer's 
server, (eventually tree, menu), to allow novices to start using 
VID/View more productively. Any chance RT can tell us, what is the 
plan for 1.4 release?

Q: What does the world on Nov-15-2005 look like?


A: Our main goal is to get REBOL into the hands of more users, not 
just programmers and techies.... by the millions over time.  By doing 
that, we create a market for not only handy free REBOL apps, but 
also for commercial apps and entire businesses that are related to 
REBOL.



Q: Given that  window transparency is OS specific, will there be 
a dialect that covers both Windows, Linux and 40+ other OS?  In other 
words, does RT plan on continued support of so many languages, or 
are we entering a new era of specific OS support?


A: Our plan is to make that a window option that is part of the face/options 
for a window.  If an OS does not support this mode, then the option 
will be ignored, but the application will still be fully functional.



Q: I hope it is still valid that cooperation with RT is possible. 
I mean - last few weeks I play with some Win32 functions (thanks 
to Gregg) and I would like we would have proper app behavior in multi-monitor/multi-desktop 
environments .... so I wonder if any SIGs will be created, some ppl 
will be invited to participate, comment etc., or if RT is gonna cook 
it all themselves?


A: Yes, there are many such special interest projects currently going 
on. (Most of them are occurring via private projects in AltME and 
IOS.)  These days 90% of REBOL changes are done in cooperation with 
the REBOL community.



Q: Hi .... with recent Rebcode releases, we can see that internally 
new Core is marked as 2.7 and View is marked as 1.4 Is it just working 
"title" or will those products be marked as that? And if so, can 
we know, what other changes will go for 1.4 View release target? 
Will there be any AGG fixes/additions (to support SVG RebGUI progress), 
or even VID changes? I still think, that VID is missing few fine 
styles as tab, group-box, better list as was introduced on IOS Developer's 
server, (eventually tree, menu), to allow novices to start using 
VID/View more productively. Any chance RT can tell us, what is the 
plan for 1.4 release?


A: Regarding 2.7 and 1.4 question: we change the revision numbers 
(the second number) whenever there is a major change in REBOL that 
may be unstable.  The /core 2.7 kernel (that is in /view 1.4 as well) 
adds new datatypes to REBOL, and they are the first datatypes added 
in several years, so we consider this to be a major change, and marked 
it that way.
Yes, we do plan to be making a few AGG fixes very soon.

Oh, and regarding VID: we plan to be making very big changes there. 
More to come soon.


Q: Could you add struct! support to /Core?

I keep on having situations that would be made much easier by struct! 
when I don't need libraries. For instance, conversions from external 
binary data encodings to internal REBOL values, say for file formats, 
network protocols and so on. Now rebcode has added other forms of 
strong typing like the type-specific opcodes and the vectors. Having 
structs with their constrained field types, their specific data layouts, 
would be a perfect match for the low level operations of rebcode. 
They would be helpful later when implementing your own data types 
as well.


A: On structs: yes, we will enable this feature on core, but it should 
only be used for lower level code.  Objects are more powerful.


Q: Could you add an APPLY opcode to rebcode?

    apply: ["Apply function or path to arguments, save result" word! 
    word! | path! block!]

In rebcode:
    apply x f [arg1 arg2 ...]
Is equivalent to this in REBOL:
    x: do f arg1 arg2 ...


The advantage to doing function calls this way is that the arity 
of the opcode is fixed, even if the arity of the function called 
can't be known ahead of time. The value assigned to the function 
word could be either a function or a path, or for efficiency you 
could have a seperate opcode APPLYP for path values (I'd prefer just 
one opcode for generality but it's your call).


A: I'm not sure what is meant by the path for it. You mean for refinements?
That may actually slow down the apply interface.

It's funny, I had to reboot Windows more often while testing rebcode 
than I have ever needed to for an entire year with that computer. 
Server 2003 is very stable, but crashing processes a dozen times 
or more a day can wear on it a little, so I needed to reboot every 
couple days. Normally I would need to reboot only for occasional 
updates of certain third-party software, never more than once a couple 
months.

Jaime - e.g. what I need is quite simple - having app on Windows, 
I need to submit my data to mySQL data in Poland, so it needs to 
be translated to another charset .... (but IIRC it can be done on 
server, so I will hopefully manage it without rebol supporting unicode 
for now )

question: I own a Linksys WAP54G access point which runs on a MIPS 
processor with a small Linux server on it. I tried loading REBOL/Core 
for MIPS onto it, but it couldn't run.


The thing is, there is quite a lot of embedded hardware that runs 
such small linux servers. It would be easy to make control software 
via REBOL, connected to a PC running an encapped REBOL/View application. 
This would allow for rich realtime control software, rather than 
using the normal (slow and non-realtime) built-in webserver. I already 
managed to get realtime readouts on signal strength, by polling the 
access point through telnet and displaying a simple meter in a REBOL/View 
script, something not normally possible. But  you could do much, 
much more, if you could run /Core on it directly. I think there is 
a lot of unused potential here.


Would RT consider such ports of REBOL/Core to various embedded hardware 
products and provide a list of embedded hardware products that can 
run /Core?

maybe have rebol in the plugin download a license from a web server 
or something like that.

It may require a certificated authentication server that stores the 
license keys.

pressing the "Read FTP" button in the test script gives me:


** User Error: Server error: tcp 421 Unable to set up secure anonymous 
FTP
** Near: view-text read ftp://ftp.rebol.com/test.txt
>>

Only when that service is running on a different server than the 
web server the script was served from. A user's data can be sent 
over the URL that requested the script, or an AJAX connection. A 
certain amount of network access is assumed.

The places a browser puts persistent data, and manages that data, 
are cookies and the temporary file cache. There are already security 
restrictions and management tools for those places. That existing 
persistent storage should be sufficient for REBOL scripts loaded 
by the regular plugin. Any other storage should be on the server, 
with the same server access restrictions as JavaScript. Anything 
more should be restricted to trusted sites.

say I have a farm of  pcs running some seti like application and 
rebol using the browser plugin with lns to send the results back 
to a server.

If the browser plugin is doing the distributed computing work, the 
result sets could be sent to the server under the restrictions I 
propose.

Java applets and JavaScript scripts are usually only allowed to access 
their own server over the network. I think you can make that same 
restriction to REBOL using the secure native.

With Java, the applet is only allowed to communicate with the server 
that served up the applet. We could make that same restriction by 
default in the REBOL plugin with SECURE, and then relax the restrictions 
at runtime with SECURE again. Of course, that will cause the security 
requester to pop up and the user would then know what they should 
know and agree to anyways before such behavior is allowed at all.

wrt own window on top to do the window messages, etc -- I'm all for 
slamming itself on top of the browser, and not going through it to 
embed view.   or make it a "windowed" control, which is how IE does 
SELECT elements.  The complexity there is having it crop to be part 
of the page.  I think wndows media control is like that, where you 
can pick a windowed version, which performs better (probably from 
similar things that you are running into.  MSAgent runs in the browser, 
and is allowed ro roam anywhere on the screen in an irregularly shaped 
winoow.  It also starts a server process which handles all calls 
to the interactions with applications like IE and Office that take 
advantage of that aspect.  It's all asynchronous/multithreaded, and 
shuts down automatically when there are no more client controls to 
serve.


The DOM provides screen position information, but the downside is 
that with embedded controls like Adobe SVG viewer and Flash is that 
they will respond correctly to transparency (showing html page background 
through transparent parts of control  -- never got REBOL plugin to 
do that, which has something to do with wmode="transparent"  or something 
similar

Dunno if my last post last night made it.  as soon as I sent it, 
the world went down and i was unable to reconnect.  I think there 
is a misunderstanding about what a windowed control is, and that 
is throwing people off.  In the post I mentioned how MSAgent works, 
where you have a central server app that communicates with all the 
instances of the control, and I think something like that would be 
perfect for REBOL.  If there was a way to create an instance dynamically 
( using new ActiveXObject, for instance), then for those plugin scripts 
not needing the View UI, that would be a nice option, because that 
would allow using it from a WSF, as well.  On a side note, when trying 
to use the plugin in an HTA it's crash city.

Looks like Volker covered the security issues I'd note.  About Rebol 
as a COM server process--I would think that would be the way to go. 
 Pretty sure that is how Acrobat runs, too.  Basically, the first 
time you run into a PDF on the web Acrobat32 starts, and handles 
all instances.

Security extension, yes, removal of something - hehe, how uneducated 
imo :-) Is smtp so difficult to build? Having tcp socket is dangerous 
already, as I can build my custom smtp in script, and have server 
at the other end of the country, which listens on 8080 and doing 
smtp ....

You can also run a mail-server on the machine where you host the 
reblet, then send works.

Flash does not work? YOu have full networking to your own server, 
what else do you need?

The urls are blocked so you can not reach a "legit" mail-server so 
you can not 'send.

If you host the reblet from your irc-server, its no problem. Else 
the user needs to bless you explicitely, like with noscript.