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Rebol Fluid

 [1/18] from: al:bri:xtra at: 6-Dec-2000 21:05


Here's an idea for an application that could make a lot of money for anyone who wants to take it up. Using Rebol, one could make an equivalent to Groove (http://www.groove.com ?), but capable of creating, editing and running Rebol script, text, and object oriented pictures (maybe even audio and video with Rebol/Media (soon to be released?)). Then the edits could be distributed peer to peer, to those concerned, as Rebol script. The interface could either be Rebol/View or Rebol/Core + Browser using http. This would enable a serverless wiki, email lists that are meaningful, and don't have advertising or require a server. With care, large software developement projects could be easier to develop in concert with other developers around the world. Andrew Martin ICQ: 26227169 http://members.nbci.com/AndrewMartin/

 [2/18] from: petr:krenzelok:trz:cz at: 6-Dec-2000 9:22


Andrew Martin wrote:
> Here's an idea for an application that could make a lot of money for anyone > who wants to take it up. Using Rebol, one could make an equivalent to Groove > (http://www.groove.com ?), but capable of creating, editing and running > Rebol script, text, and object oriented pictures (maybe even audio and video > with Rebol/Media (soon to be released?)).
:-))) ;-)
> Then the edits could be > distributed peer to peer, to those concerned, as Rebol script. The interface
<<quoted lines omitted: 3>>
> projects could be easier to develop in concert with other developers around > the world.
Well, in my opinion, there is also need for REBOL/Browse plug-in. Ability to draw into standard browser window has some psychological aspect - user thinks it's a browser .... And we know how to produce nice forms in View, right? RT has plan for many various products, so everything is possible .... I am just a little bit confused how does such project fit in Rebmail concept? It's too many of projects, maybe it would be good to have some website describing them all in a few sentences .... -pekr-

 [3/18] from: dan:rolander at: 6-Dec-2000 7:48


Personally, I like the fact that Rebol enables internet applications without the use of a browser. Browsers have become too heavy and I think they've become very boring. Besides, who wants to be tied to IE forever? Dan

 [4/18] from: kolla:nvg:ntnu:no at: 6-Dec-2000 13:59


On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Dan Rolander wrote:
> Personally, I like the fact that Rebol enables internet applications without > the use of a browser. Browsers have become too heavy and I think they've > become very boring. Besides, who wants to be tied to IE forever?
Browsers are too heavy? Internet Explorer? You must be spoiled hardware wice, on my machine, comparing rebol/view against any of my browsers, rebol/view comes out as the slow and heavy one :) -- kolla

 [5/18] from: dan:rolander at: 6-Dec-2000 8:39


Hmmm... Seems okay on my P3-350. It's certainly a lot better than loading and running a Java Swing applet. ;-) Dan

 [6/18] from: chris:starforge:demon at: 6-Dec-2000 13:28


Dan Rolander wrote:
> Personally, I like the fact that Rebol enables internet applications without > the use of a browser.
I think I've missed your point there - a wide range of "internet applications" do not require a web browser, even on Windows. Rebol makes writing internet aplications simpler, but I don't quite know where the browser comment fits in there...
> Browsers have become too heavy and I think they've
I think "bloated" is the term you're looking for. And not all of them have. Besdes, that's not always the fault of bad programming - if users want features the code has to go somewhere...
> become very boring. Besides, who wants to be tied to IE forever?
Umm.. I don't even use IE; I use Netscape on Linux and Unix and IBrowse on my Amiga. If I can possibly avoid it I don't use software from the Gatesian Empire.. Chris -- New sig in the works Explorer2260 Designer and Coder http://www.starforge.co.uk

 [7/18] from: dan:rolander at: 6-Dec-2000 8:54


Boy, I have to remember to be careful what I post... ;-) 1. See the bottom of the post. Someone suggested a Rebol/Browser Plugin. That's what my comment was regarding. 2. If you think a 100 MB install of IE 5.5 is okay, fine. It seems a little excessive to me. 3. I would love to live in the Linux/Netscape world (and I do at home). But if you work for any major corporation you are going to be forced to live in the M$/IE world. Not a pleasant place to be. Dan

 [8/18] from: kolla:nvg:ntnu:no at: 6-Dec-2000 15:00


On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Dan Rolander wrote:
> Boy, I have to remember to be careful what I post... ;-) > > 1. See the bottom of the post. Someone suggested a Rebol/Browser Plugin. > That's what my comment was regarding. > > 2. If you think a 100 MB install of IE 5.5 is okay, fine. It seems a little > excessive to me.
How do you manage that? I install IE all day long here (so it feels, as slow as that server of M$ is) and even when I select all the languages, and extra fonts, and avoid outlook and some other non-usefull stuff, I come up to 44MB. On the other hand, I myself just downloaded the non-java version of Opera5 which is only 2MB.
> 3. I would love to live in the Linux/Netscape world (and I do at home). But > if you work for any major corporation you are going to be forced to live in > the M$/IE world. Not a pleasant place to be.
Well, you have plenty of browsers on windows, no reason to stick with IE if you dont like it. -- kolla

 [9/18] from: brett::codeconscious::com at: 7-Dec-2000 1:01


Unfortunately I can't access the Groove site at the moment but I have a rough idea of what it is. I think your concept Andrew, heralds a very powerful future use for Rebol that is aligned with its original goal - communication.. Brett.

 [10/18] from: mat:eurogamer at: 6-Dec-2000 14:12


Heya Dan, DR> 2. If you think a 100 MB install of IE 5.5 is okay, fine. It seems a little DR> excessive to me. Yes and we all know how expensive that hard drive space is now. Err. Oh. DR> 3. I would love to live in the Linux/Netscape world (and I do at home). But DR> if you work for any major corporation you are going to be forced to live in DR> the M$/IE world. Not a pleasant place to be. Or perhaps you just enjoy using computers and *doing* stuff like running applications, playing games and programming. It really gets up my nose when yet another evangelist for platform X crawls out spouting the same anti Microsoft stuff. Yawn. I came here for Rebol and don't personally give a rat's arse what operating system you run it on or what you think of my/our chose operating systems either. I thought this stuff had died back in the 16-bit era. -- Mat Bettinson - EuroGamer's Gaming Evangelist with a Goatee http://www.eurogamer.net | http://www.eurogamer-network.com

 [11/18] from: chris:starforge:demon at: 6-Dec-2000 14:37


Dan Rolander wrote:
> 1. See the bottom of the post. Someone suggested a Rebol/Browser Plugin. > That's what my comment was regarding.
I can't really see a problem with it to be honest. Java can be used to make internet applications without the use of a web browser too, but applets are still useful. Embedding a /view script in a page may be used to improve pages in much the same way as applets (although "improve" here is subjective thing...) And just like there are java plugins for more than IE alone, there's no need to tie such support to a single browser. Chris -- New sig in the works Explorer2260 Designer and Coder http://www.starforge.co.uk

 [12/18] from: kolla:nvg:ntnu:no at: 6-Dec-2000 16:32


On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Chris wrote:
> Dan Rolander wrote: > > 1. See the bottom of the post. Someone suggested a Rebol/Browser Plugin.
<<quoted lines omitted: 6>>
> more than IE alone, there's no need to tie such support to a single > browser.
All you really need to do is to tell your browser to open rebol scripts with rebol/view, right? An official MIME-type would be nice, so that everyone who intend to use rebol script on their sites can use the same MIME type. -- kolla

 [13/18] from: dan:rolander at: 6-Dec-2000 10:45


Yikes! I'll keep my comments to those that are code-related from now on. I didn't mean to offend anyone, and I don't think of myself as an evangelist of any type. Have a nice day.

 [14/18] from: mat:eurogamer at: 6-Dec-2000 16:46


Heya Dan, DR> I'll keep my comments to those that are code-related from now on. I didn't DR> mean to offend anyone, and I don't think of myself as an evangelist of any DR> type. Sorry matey, must have had a bee in my bonnet at the time. -- Mat Bettinson - EuroGamer's Gaming Evangelist with a Goatee http://www.eurogamer.net | http://www.eurogamer-network.com

 [15/18] from: dguyer:cdsnet at: 7-Dec-2000 8:08


> Browsers have become too heavy and I think > they've become very boring.
Download Opera and give it a try---it's free. I believe you'll be very pleasantly surprised. I sure was!

 [16/18] from: chaz:innocent at: 10-Dec-2000 2:49


You were talking about a REBOL "Fluid", how about an "Sea"? There's a group called KOSH, "Kommunity Operating System and Hardware" and they're trying to figure out how to implement something they call the Object Sea . It would be a very different way of interacting with a computer. Seems to me that maybe this could be implemented using some kind of combination of REBOL/Command and REBOL/View... <crossposting> Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 17:48:18 -0500 From: Dave Haynie <[dhaynie--jersey--net]> To: "kosh List Member" <[kosh--chaossolutions--org]> Subject: [kosh] Ideas :) X-Mailer: Becky! ver 1.26.03 X-Return-Path: [List-Admin--chaossolutions--org] X-MDMailing-List: [kosh--chaossolutions--org] X-MDSend-Notifications-To: [List-Admin--chaossolutions--org] Reply-To: [kosh--chaossolutions--org] X-MDaemon-Deliver-To: [chaz--innocent--com] On Tue, 14 Nov 2000 23:22:03 +0100 (CET), Marcus Petersson <[d4marcus--dtek--chalmers--se]> jammed all night, and by sunrise was overheard remarking:
> On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, chaz wrote: > > Tell me a story, paint a picture in words, of what the Object Sea would > > "look" like to a user in front of it. > That's a pretty large request, but I guess it has been long overdue. :-)
Well, I think, from the casual user's point of view, the Object Sea is not really something normally all that obvious. After all, are you necessarily presented with functions, procedures, and libraries in the normal, user-level experience in AmigaOS, Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc?
> Basically, the Object Sea is a collection of objects. You can have many > different views of it. One view is the hierarchial one - it's a tree with > a root, branches and leaves (or nodes). The root object is the grandparent > of all other objects, and in a way it also contains all of them. This is > actually what we call the Object Sea (or Cybersea as it's called elsewhere > - a silly name in my opinion).
I coined the "Object Sea" phrase, that's how I've thought of the concept for the last 10 years or so. Anyone's free to come up with a better description. Anyway, for programmers, what you say is somewhat true, in that classes are objects (at least in my model). But in a user's experience, you can still think of "files" if you like. An object sea based OS could still seem to have a perfectly ordinary user file structure. The difference is salient, but perhaps not something the user ever cares about. In fact, one major point of the object sea idea is to make things easier on the user. Since everything is, in fact, an object, the user can directly do things with any object, and something meaningful nearly always happens. For example, if you click on an object, it'll probably either run or display itself. If you drop a data object into a running program, it'll try to do something useful -- directly, if the application knows that object interface; via system level translators if this isn't the case (for example, you could write a translator that does "image to text", and from then on, any text file dropped into a graphics program would render graphically as text, best as possible). Stuff that, really, lives above the object sea would give rise to the user's interactive experience. For example, what's the default action when you click on a data object? In the Mac and BeOS world, this is usually going to mean "launch the 'parent' application". But I don't believe in parent applications; or more specicially, single ones. I guess that's something I learned on the Amiga with graphics, and continue to experience on the PC. So I would have the default method be "display" (technically, you're sending a "mouse-click" method to the object, but most will translate this into object-centric default actions). When you call up a "display", you get what I call a "pad", a very basic box for holding some kind of image, movie, sound, etc -- less than a window. If you just clicked on a JPEG, you'd get that pad in a window. If you dropped it into an application, the OS would provide the message of object dropping. If the app handles the object type directly, it gets the object. Otherwise, the OS builds a pad for that, which is handed to the application (most applications would handle pads). When you have a pad, anywhere, objects can be dropped into it, too. For example, if I clicked on that JPEG alone, I would have a pad with the JPEG image running in it. Let's say I then drag a "DPaint XIII" object into that pad. The expected result would be that the DPaint tool bars dock on an edge of that pad, and immediately, the image is made much more active, under the rules of DPaint. If I then dropped "Imagine 10" onto the pad, it, too, would fire up its control panel. Multiple apps on the same pad would grow some kind of "activation box" -- you'd click on that to make the associated app the one immediate to the pad (after all, you can't have two sets of rules applied, unless they're somehow complementary applications -- in a sense, a master and a plug-in).
> Every other object is a child of a parent object, it inherits its parent's > propererties, but usually also include some characteristics of its own.
Well, yes and no. A class object contains a mix of data and methods, which you could calls its characteristics. Class objects create instance objects, which typically add additional, instance-specific data, but rarely new functions. These are instances of said class object, not children. You can also create a new class object which inherits methods and global data from one or more existing class objects, and extends these in some way, either by making an interesting mesh of multiple classes, or perhaps adding new, more focused/specific, or just plain different methods. This is what you'd probably call a child object.
> The common user collection object is called a set. It differs from a > directory foremost in being an object (which can be powerful enough), but > also in that it can have attributes.
Here, I disagree. For one, a "set" has certain mathematical connotations I don't think you want here. A very, very basic feature of my abstract object model, which gave rise to the whole object sea concept, is the notion of container objects: you can have an object which can hold, in some reasonable way, other objects. Methods on a container object can be things like add, delete, list, sort, etc. More sophisticated operations include things like method broadcast (eg, send a method to every object in the container), which forms the basis for "translucent" containers. In a translucent container, the the container plus contained takes on something of the appearance of an object of both classes, but of course, it's dynamic. The simplest type is basically a container than handles its own methods but broadcasts all methods it doesn't understand. When you have container objects, and you know that everything stored on disc is inherently an object, it's easy to see that the equivalent of a directory in a file system is nothing more than a container object, perhaps optimized for some specific use. -- Dave Haynie | V.P. Technology, [Met--box] AG | http://www.metabox.de ------------------------ To unsubscribe - post to [mdaemon--Chaossolutions--org] with Unsubscribe kosh as the only line in the body. Problems, complaints - [List-Admin--chaossolutions--org] Web site - http://kosh.convergence.org </crossposting> At 09:05 PM 12/6/00 +1300, you wrote:

 [17/18] from: petr:krenzelok:trz:cz at: 10-Dec-2000 13:24


----- Original Message ----- From: chaz <[chaz--innocent--com]> To: <[rebol-list--rebol--com]> Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2000 11:49 AM Subject: [REBOL] Re: Rebol Fluid
> You were talking about a REBOL "Fluid", how about an "Sea"? > There's a group called KOSH, "Kommunity Operating System and Hardware" and > they're trying to figure out how to implement something they call the > "Object Sea". It would be a very different way of interacting with a
computer. Of course I know of KOSH, being on the ml back at the time it was founded by Fleecy Moss and Dave Haynie. Although KOSH project seems to be still alive, I think we will meet with most of its principles via upcoming Amiga Digital Environment, as it is designed by Fleecy Moss (currently Amiga Inc.) .... It will be imo cool. As for KOSH principles - we are near. Just look at current rebol architecture, look how VID is created, how it works etc. IMO Rebol is the nearest thingy to KOSH principles nowadays ..... There are also another initiatives, as PhDesk project, which is about to bring much better user experience to QNX RtP system .... Cheers, -pekr-

 [18/18] from: d4marcus:dtek:chalmers:se at: 13-Dec-2000 18:51


I figured I shouldn't let this pass without a comment... On Sun, 10 Dec 2000, Petr Krenzelok wrote:
> Although KOSH project seems to be still alive, I think we will meet with > most of its principles via upcoming > Amiga Digital Environment, as it is designed by Fleecy Moss (currently Amiga > Inc.) .... It will be imo cool.
No doubt, I'm looking forward to it too. AmigaDE is possibly the only real advancement in mainstream OS technology since BeOS. Well, maybe you could count QNX too, but that isn't exactly mainstream, and besides, parts of its design is older than BeOS. But the Elate/Amiga stuff seems promising. Still, it seems to carry some old baggage with it, for example the concept of a filesystem. This may not seem important, but it does impose some restrictions on how object oriented the environment can be. Which in its turn affects user experience. So, even if AmigaDE means a revolution for both system-level development and user experience, it will not be a total revolution as long as it comes with the filesystem legacy. Hopefully, they will be developing a system object database sometime, I'm quite sure this is Fleecy's intention anyway. But you don't always get what you want.
> As for KOSH principles - we are near. Just look at current rebol > architecture, look how VID is created, how it works etc. > IMO Rebol is the nearest thingy to KOSH principles nowadays .....
Very nice, but not really close to KOSH principles. Someone started the question of a database written in Rebol, and chaz mentioned he'd use it to store face components. I think this is perfectly reasonable idea, and it's something I would appriciate as well. By all means, go ahead and create it. If you could store REBOL code and data objects like that, you can achieve lots of benifits. "There's no end to the possibilities". :-) One thing you could do (or so I think) is to create a dialect, that each time an unknown word is called looks it up in the database. You get your own Rebol repository, a sort of library containing all your Rebol code and data, even non-Rebol data (but in base64 form). You wouldn't need to use files at all, except when you install ("import") something new. This of course includes editing existing code, unless you had a decent Rebol editor, or could convince an existing editor to talk to the database. And whenever you need something from the database in a file, you call the "export" function. Still quite a bit from the object sea idea we have in KOSH. But if you could boot the computer directly into Rebol, with or without View, run some simple filesystem or DBMS underneath, then have drivers talk to the hardware, essentially have your entire working environment within Rebol - then you would be close. But I don't yet see such a thing, in Rebol or anything else. That's why we're continuing KOSH. Marcus ------------------------------------ If you find that life spits on you calm down and pretend it's raining

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