[REBOL] Re: More view questions...
From: jason:cunliffe:verizon at: 28-Aug-2002 17:55
Hi Andy
The English edition of Olivier Auverlot's French book is due out _sometime_
soon.
It's very well written, and the only one which covers View/VID in print.
http://www.rebolfrance.org/livre/livre.html
His site RebolFrance has great stuff, much if it a by-product of articles
written for the superb LOGIN magazine.
http://www.rebolfrance.org
http://www.rebolfrance.org/telechargement.html
Unfortunately since there are few francophiles here, RebolFrance contributions
tends to be overlooked. If I find/make time, I can help translate more goodies
from there into English. This is partly what triggered the recent 'locale'
thread following %Maoww.r, the French jabber client written in /View
In case you have not already, check:
http://www.rebol.com/view/docs/../demos/easy-vid.r
It's pretty easy to adapt that mechanism to your own use and the source is
instructive.
For example you can generalize it in 5 minutes so it can load a library of
external files. These could be anywhere and shared.The rare magic of easy-vid is
being able to interpret and visualize GUI code in the middle of a document. I
can think of few other programming environments which offer such a wonderful
intuitive transparent feature.
'Mathematica' is perhaps the golden example. I know that Kevin Altis and the
PythonCard team are hard at work to enable this. They have their sights set on
the needs of teaching programming in education. Also looking under the hood of
%easy-draw.r and %easy-plot.r might be helpful to you..
<start YARDR: Yet-another-rebol-documentation-rant>
For reasons that are still beyond me, REBOL is almost off the Internet~web
radar. Google, which is otherwise fucking brilliant, seems to have a rebol
blind-spot. I almost always have to work it hard 'manually' to track down rebol
help with it.
One reason is that a lot of code exists on rebsites which you access from /View
desktop.
There is no built-in search, indexing or sensible filtering mechanism in /View
for rebsites. Neither is there any sensible gateway between rebsites and
wiki/blogs as is happening EVERYWHERE else these days [compare PHP and FLashMX
communities]... And of course the fabulous developments happening between Jabber
and XML-RPC folks.
[see my recent post http://www.escribe.com/internet/rebol/m24848.html ]
Truly it's a crying shame as it is easy to do in Rebol and would show off many
of its virtues to a larger public. RT have applied their brilliant talents, but
very limited human resources and effort into /IOS.
So /View is packed off to the orphanage/boardingschool in the meantime.
Even RT's own site hides the link for this in a counter-intuitive place:
http://www.rebol.com
Then listed under "Company" click on "support"
Half way down that page in the "Email List Archive" paragraph is a pale khaki
link :-((
I think this community and REBOL deserve and NEED much better than E-Scribes
default search tools. [it sucks imo].
So the mailing list being a small community does a heroic and humane job.
Recently someone was also trying to process the list archives to extract and
distill the accrued rebol knowledge. "black gold that is!"
</end YARDR>
Someone did put up a rebsite search script a while back.
Search the mailing list archives to find it!
Vanilla and/or Andrew Martin's wiki would make a fabulous vehicle for REBOL
wisdom.
/View implies that it should be used to document itself, which is why I like the
mechanism in %easy-vid.r, but it needs to be tied in to a rebol-based wiki/blog
so it can be shared and maintained as natural by product of this list. It is so
easy to store REBOL code everywhere, in email, web pages, images.. Then just 'do
it. /View is a ubiquitous desktop engine but not so much use unless is better
integrated with other Internet systems [email web wiki jabber etc].
hth
./Jason
______________________________________________
Jason Cunliffe [NOMADICS: Director art+design]
Tel/fax: +1 718 422-1078 [jasonic--nomadics--org]
N 43:00.000' W 074:31.875' ALT:1144 ft
84 Henry Street #3C Brooklyn NY 11201 USA
