Why are there no PDA ports of REBOL available?
[1/4] from: elutz:apriori at: 9-Sep-2000 18:24
Hi all,
I am amazed by REBOL as a language environmment - it's like a dream has
become true.
However, I am worried about the fact that there are no ports to PDAs
available yet, not even to the most popular platforms, e.g., Palm and Psion.
I would like to carry REBOL around with me on a small pocket sized Psion
Revo machine ... anywhere, anyplace. Win CE seems irrelevant to me in
comparison, seen from the no. of machines sold.
I understand the technical difficulties with a Palm Pilot which not even has
usual file i/o, but the Psion 5 Series aka Ericsson EPOC machines are
already "shrinked PCs" from the viewpoint of their programming model.
Although REBOL is a great piece of software it competes today in a market of
PCs and bigger machines where there is plenty of scripting environments
around from which one can choose one ad nauseam.
But with its small footprint I think REBOL should be ported fast to the
smaller machines where there are nearly no good scripting environments
(Psion OPL is a crutch in comparison to REBOL) and where "fatware" is not
appropriate anyway.
And by the way, how is REBOL, Inc.'s business approach towards even smaller
machines like mobile telephones? Should one give up and leave them alone
with embedded Java machines? I see this from a European perspective where a
lot of companies keep to the opinion that the number of platforms in the
mobile market even today is much bigger than the no. of installed PCs will
ever be! And the migration path (GSM -> GPRS -> UMTS) is already defined
with replacement cycles of 12-18 months for the mobile phones in use.
And from a marketing perspective i feel it's not more diffcult to convince a
telecom provider to jump onto REBOL as it is to get approval from an
corporate IT manager to install REBOL on a mission critical OS/390 ...
Opinions please ...
Eberhard Lutz
Frankfurt, Germany
[working for the financial industry]
[2/4] from: norsepower:uswest at: 9-Sep-2000 11:48
If a BeIA-based PDA surfaces, then REBOL "may" work by default since BeIA
is
BeOS.
[3/4] from: pa:russo:perd at: 9-Sep-2000 20:40
>Hi all,
>
>I am amazed by REBOL as a language environmment - it's like a dream has
>become true.
>
>However, I am worried about the fact that there are no ports to PDAs
>available yet,...
I agree with you completely, Eberhard. I'm eager to see an EPOC
porting of REBOL. But... I remember a thread long ago where Rebol
Tech explained us the technical limitations of PDA platforms
preventing them from an easy porting. "Too much effort for now to
find a serious workaround, our resources are not infinite and we have
a lot to do with /View, /command, etc...". If I remember correctly,
this was the sense of their answers. It makes sense, although I'm not
happy about it.
Moreover, I'm afraid the UMTS market is quite an european business,
more than an U.S. one. We're far more cell-phone dependant than them.
Anyway, I don't foresee a great future in Europe for toys like
PDA's... simply they don't make sense when you look at the new UMTS
cell-phones. But I believe this is not true in the U.S.A.
Am I wrong?
--
Paolo Russo
[pa--russo--perd--com]
_________________
PERD s.r.l.
Virtual Technologies for Real Solutions
http://www.perd.com
[4/4] from: rishi:picostar at: 9-Sep-2000 12:39
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_003E_01C01A5B.069443E0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I think rebol would be surprised at how popular rebol for epoc (psion's OS) would be.
OPL, psion's built in, interpreted, programming language is extremely popular among the
psion crowd in europe. There are lot's of opl programs coming out for psion simply because
it is much easier to program with opl than c++ (opl is like basic). opl does have access
to some native epoc C++ modules and can also be used to create a gui. Recently, psion
has been trying to get java working with epoc, but it hasn't been that popular (for obvious
reasons!). The biggest reason the Rebol Tech should bring rebol/core , rebol/command
to psion is because I believe Psion would bundle it with there systems and rebol will
gain an international audience. They would get great press (in my opinion) if they partnered
with psion which in turn will create lots of exposure to language. They should talk with
psion first and see if they would be willing to bundle with epoc. If so, they should
definately go for it.
One thing they can afford leave out of the epoc version of rebol is the command shell
if this is hard to do (initially). OPL users will not mind either since they are not
used to having this feature.
By the way, I'm not a huge psion fan so I am not stating this from a biased point of
view. Infact, I would prefer if rebol focused there efforts on getting core/view/command
on the great, new, upcoming OS, QNX RTP. A beautiful language on top of a beautiful OS.
I can only hope...
Rishi
------=_NextPart_000_003E_01C01A5B.069443E0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META content="MSHTML 5.00.2614.3500" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I think rebol would be surprised at how popular
rebol for epoc (psion's OS) would be. OPL, psion's built in, interpreted,
programming language is extremely popular among the psion crowd in europe. There
are lot's of opl programs coming out for psion simply because it is much easier
to program with opl than c++ (opl is like basic). opl does have access to some
native epoc C++ modules and can also be used to create a gui. Recently, psion
has been trying to get java working with epoc, but it hasn't been that popular
(for obvious reasons!). The biggest reason the Rebol Tech should bring
rebol/core , rebol/command to psion is because I believe Psion would bundle it
with there systems and rebol will gain an international audience. They would get
great press (in my opinion) if they partnered with psion which in turn will
create lots of exposure to language. They should talk with psion first and see
if they would be willing to bundle with epoc. If so, they should definately go
for it.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>One thing they can afford leave out of the epoc
version of rebol is the command shell if this is hard to do (initially). OPL
users will not mind either since they are not used to having this feature.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>By the way, I'm not a huge psion fan so I am not
stating this from a biased point of view. Infact, I would prefer if rebol
focused there efforts on getting core/view/command on the great, new, upcoming
OS, QNX RTP. A beautiful language on top of a beautiful OS. I can only
hope...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Rishi</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>
------=_NextPart_000_003E_01C01A5B.069443E0--