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[REBOL] A word to all novice port programmers

From: cribbsj:oakwood at: 19-Oct-2000 15:41

This message goes out to all you who, like me, are novices when it comes to using ports to communicate between your Rebol script and other programs. I am in the process of learning Rebol. I have been writing some small applications that use text files to store any data needed. Because Core does not allow you to run system commands and because I do not yet have much experience using ports to communicate, I thought that I would have to wait until I purchased Command or someone wrote a script that connected Core to MySQL (or the like) via ports. Then I found MDBMS (www.hinttech.com). This is a very small, simple DBMS written by a guy named Marty Bochane. Basically, you start it up on a Linux box, then you can communicate to it interactively using telnet. But, wait, it gets better. MDBMS has a little utility called FOP (Fast Opendatabase Protocol). FOP allows you to open a port (default 2224) to your MDBMS database and interact with it via simple ASCII strings terminated by newlines. Using FOP, I was able to very easily open up a port while in Rebol, send sql queries to my MDBMS database, and receive the result set. It was so cool! Here I was, a guy who knows VERY little about port programming, basically building a client/server app in less than 30 minutes. I know that this will be very mundane, basic stuff to the people on this list that have a lot of port programming experience. But, if you are a novice like me, this might be a way to get your feet wet in this subject. I know I am already learning a lot. I guess this is also a testament to Rebol's incredible knack for making things easy to do. The ability you have to easily open, read from, and write to ports is incredible! Anyway, just thought I would pass this info along. -- Jamey Cribbs