[REBOL] IE Plugin: Congrats To Carl and Staff (and some requests/proposals/suggestions)
From: rlist::techscribe::com at: 5-Mar-2004 13:22
Hi Carl, staff, and list.
I just happened to drop by at the REBOL site, and discovered the Alpha
release of the new View dll. Downloaded and installed it, and it is
beauty! The demo UI that is displayed by default is visually pleasing.
I'm very excited about this new technology, because IMHO this opens up a
relevant commercial market for REBOL programmers/consultants. I'm so
excited about this technolgoy that I've even created a new email
address, to be able to remain subscribed to this list
([rebol--techscribe--com] is being spamed so massively, that I constantly
run out of mailbox space, and then I get kicked off the REBOL list.) I
'm looking forward to the announced Plugin Developer's Kit (PDK).
Any idea when alpha or beta of PDK will become available?
Suggestion: PDK built-in end-user licensing mechanism.
1. For commerial applications I would prefer not to have to include the
REBOL dll in each released PDK based application. Instead, the standard
REBOL dll should have the ability to load an application specific dll
created with the PDK. I would be supplying the application specific dll
and the official View plugin would then load the binary application dll.
2. There should be some licensing mechanism included, such that binary
application dlls created with the PDK can demand some verification
against the originating domain name. I.e. if the Web site is accessed at
www.techscribe.com/plugin-demo and delivers the Web page index.html, and
index.html submits a dll for the View/Plugin, then, upon loading this
dll, the View/Plugin may check for a valid license key against the
domain name www.techscribe.com or against
www.techscribe.com/plugin-demo, or
www.techscribe.com/plugin-demo/index.html.
The PDK application dll would instruct the View/Plugin whether it
should check for a site-wide license, or for a Web page specific
license. The View/Plugin will then request a URL for the license code,
and the View/Plugin could then simply compare the license code to a key
created by encrupting one or the other part of the URL, in order to
verify that the application dll is being applied to an authorized Web
page, similar to the way Unix passwords are treated (i.e. the URL or
parts of the URL would be encrypted creating a unique key, and that key
would then be compared to the license key stored at the advertised URL,
similar to how Unix passwords are stored in the password file as
encrypted character sequences, and are then compared to the result of
encrypting the user's input, when that user responds to a prompt
demanding his password as part of his login.) The application plug-in
provider would then be able to license his technology either on a per
Web page basis, or per Web site license (volume discount), etc. There's
no reason why REBOL Technologies should not receive a (albeit miniscule
;-) percentage on the license fee...
3. RDBC? Another possible source of income fo REBOL Tech would be to
include an RDBC technology, similar to ODBC, or JDBC, to enable IE
Reblets to interact directly with online databases. RDBC based database
transactions would be supported with the same vocabulary already in use
for series!, based on a new series! data type, namely dbtransaction!. I.e.
>> trans: open rdbc://user:[passwrd--www--techscribe--com]/mydatabase
>> type? trans
== dbtransaction!
>> first trans
== [name: Krenzelok firstname: Petr status: active]
>> last trans
== [name: Santilli firstname: Gabriele status: active]
>> foreach [name firstname status] trans [ print ["First name: "
firstname " Last name: " name " status: " status ] ]
First name: Petr Last name: ....
4. Could REBOL by default include an alias for error! called yikes! ?
Please let me know when the PDK becomes avilable for testing etc.
TIA,
Elan