[REBOL] Some thoughts around Rebol
From: robert:muench:robertmuench at: 13-Apr-2001 15:47
Hi there, while reading through most of the postings and observing RT
progress to a complete product strategie I'm always thinking about some
stuff, which is needed to make Rebol a "professional" tool (that a big
company is going to use it):
1. Storage Formats
I would like to see RT to adapt XML as the generic storage format for all
kind of data. Rod Gaither just answered to Carl why he is going to use XML.
I fully agree with Rod. To use Rebol in a corporate environment it is
mandatory to support "standards" and using XML seems to be a good way.
2. Object serialization
I really like the functionality to store Rebol objects to disk and read them
back in again. With /Command we have access to normal database systems. What
I think would be a killer-functionality for Rebol is the following: Being
able to store objects as XML (yes, we can do it but native support would be
nice) within an object-oriented XML aware database, which supports the
following features:
- handles huge number of objects (several hundred thousands)
- fast searching (quering)
- handling of object-types as properties
- keeping Rebols run-time memory footprint low
Imagine that you can handle a lot of objects in a way that Rebol will only
load the stuff as needed. At the moment we have in memory-databases, that's
OK for some hundred objects but not for a enterprise application.
3. Office Access Layer
This is something we can do ourselve. How about a DLL, which can be used
inside Rebol, which provides a nice and lean interface to control all MS
Office applications. Than we should create a Rebol dialect for easy using.
Why we need this? Well, it doesn't make sense to reprogramm Excel and
friends (IMO) as Rebol scripts. It's better to use them and control/feed/...
all these applications with a Rebol script.
Example: We could use the presentation dialect to create a presenetation and
than just write... convert to powerpoint This would result in a PowerPoint
file containing the complete presentation.
That's it for now. Feel free to add your thoughts, flame mine ;-)) ...
Robert
