REBOL Technologies recently released the source code for the REBOL/View Desktop to promote open source development of future versions. The Desktop module is the default user interface displayed when REBOL/View is started. The Desktop is essentially a non-web-based Internet browser that provides a simple method for users to execute REBOL applications distributed across systems the world over.
REBOL/View Desktop Now Open Source
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The subject is enough for me… simply, MMM rebol ;D
REBOL is great technology-wise. I still got some gripes with the licensing, but they seem to be headed in the right direction.
what is wrong with the license? its the BSD license. don’t tell me you want everything to be released under GPL??
I think that Lennart meant overal Rebol licensing. But I have to say that RT seems to be doing better – Core, Base, Face, View are all free even for commercial usage.
Soon enough there is going to be View 1.3 released – new styles added, some done by community effort and I have to say – I never thought scripting compositing engine can produce e.g. grid style or tree-view clean and fast enough to feel real-time. I think I saw much worse examples being done in Java (not flaming here).
Well, we will see …
-pekr-
Now, it’s hard for me to decide which I should learn either REBOL or C# (Mono).. Ummm.. REBOL looks easier than C# as far from what I have read some examples.. Do anyone know how powerful REBOL is?
I’d rather have REBOL/Core open source/free software, then I’m actually gonna use it. Nevertheless it seems to be heading in the right direction, I hope Carl Sassenrath decides to open the core as well.
http://www.xwt.org is maturing *fast*
I have heard there is something being done in that regard, we will see … soon enough …
-pekr-
Well, XML once again. I just don’t seem to understand, why someone uses markup language for programming. Actually I am sorry but I think it can’t be compared with REBOL VID and style dialecting … once you will see more complicated rebol styles and how to “program” them using VID, you will how easy it is done.
… and we have yet to see alternative windowing engine called Liquid glass or so 🙂
As for Rebol being powerfull enough? I don’t know – each tool has its plusses and minuses. Rebol will be surely magnitude slower than Java or C# on some math stuff etc., but it imo can’t be beaten in regards to general UI fast prototyping. But don’t expect you will be able to write more complex apps using it, e.g. Word or Excel clone.
-pekr-
“I think that Lennart meant overal Rebol licensing. But I have to say that RT seems to be doing better – Core, Base, Face, View are all free even for commercial usage.”
Quite correct. I’m not too keen on seeing shell access not being in REBOL/Core and REBOL/View as it’d make REBOL very useful to me. That said, I’ve got REBOL/View/Pro, but I can’t expect everyone to dish out $49 or $99 to run my scripts…
@Julan
Hell no, I much prefer the BSD license over the GPL. Like I said above, I’m not complaining about the REBOL/Desktop license.
Well, the topic was discussed zillion times already. We just can’t do more. There is some intermediate way – RT offer Encapsulator – you take your script and you choose .exe name and Encapsulator will generate it for you – you just can’t expose rebol functionality, but you can use it – so you can make end-user app, which uses ODBC, shell, library interface, but I think it is not what you wanted …
So look for upcoming os version of rebol core … I can’t say more right now.
-pekr-
“Well, the topic was discussed zillion times already. We just can’t do more.”
I know.
“There is some intermediate way – RT offer Encapsulator – you take your script and you choose .exe name and Encapsulator will generate it for you – you just can’t expose rebol functionality, but you can use it – so you can make end-user app, which uses ODBC, shell, library interface, but I think it is not what you wanted …”
No, not as it would require me to enter the royalty program and I’m not *that* keen on paying $499 per year just to be able to release freeware apps _if_ I want to do so. Like you said, we and others have discussed this many times before.
“So look for upcoming os version of rebol core … I can’t say more right now.”
I’m a frequent lurker on the ML and I’m always looking for upcoming version of REBOL and seeing that RT “freed” the sound features in View 1.2.10 makes me believe that I one day might get what I want – shell access in REBOL/View.
Nice to see you around Pekr. 🙂
REBOL is a great language. It is lamentable that REBOL isn’t under some open-source license. It has caused some actual problems for me (like no having REBOL/View or even /Core on my Zaurus- no port for it yet done by the REBOL folks, or having REBOL/View on WinCE), but on the platforms it does exist, I don’t hesitate to use it.
It’s unfortunate though, I’ve a feeling REBOL won’t last. The climate is such that the people who would be largely adopting REBOL avoid it because it isn’t open source. REBOL should know this- it doesn’t matter what makes the most sense from a business perspective, if you don’t play into the culture, you’ll be SOL. It’s a shame, because if REBOL dies, the rest of us will be the ones truly at a loss, with our beloved REBOL dead, and no upgrade path. That said, I think Carl of REBOL would have the sense to open source it all if REBOL was close to death- he isn’t stupid or malicious toward REBOL’s users. There is also someone working on an open source REBOL clone:
http://www.compkarori.com/vanilla/
Which is supposed to be released on July 1. In what form and how done, I don’t know. But it’d be great to have an open source REBOL that allows me to use the features REBOL Inc wants me to pay for- like using external C libraries.
At first, REBOL looked cheesy to me. A goofy, very specific language for getting data over the net. When one looks deeper though, you see that it is that is a really well done language (a lot like a parens-less Lisp or Scheme) with really good support for URL/net protocols. REBOL/View is the easiest programmatic GUI building system I’ve used.
And this is coming from a hardcore Smalltalk coder, not some schmuck who loves every new scripting language just because it’s flashy.
REBOL fits in perfect next to Smalltalk in my toolbox; Smalltalk for most of what I need to do, and REBOL for a number of scripts, big and small. If I need CGI, I’ll do it in REBOL; if I’m doing a big huge webapp, I do it in Smalltalk (Squeak + Seaside). Perl, Python and Ruby all are a waste of time to me compared to REBOL for these tasks. The kinds of tasks I would have reached to Perl or Python for in the past I know do in REBOL, taking a lot less time and code.
Sadly there’s still no version of REBOL/View for OS X. Not even one that would be based on X11, which should be quite an easy port to do.
There are versions of REBOL/View for Amiga and BeOS, which is nice for cross-platform compatibility but a little bit weird as OS X has currently a somewhat bigger market share than those.
at IBM’s developerworks site. It’s surprisingly easy to learn and I’m a programming newbie. Think I’ll spend a few weeks seeing what I can do with it – well, when it’s raining outside , of course.
Lennart – you are wrong – you don’t need to sign royalty scheme, untill you charge for your apps, so you can use encapsulator and freely distribute your apps!
open-source rebol version is supposed to be /Core clone released under GPL. In addition soft threading, extendability of language etc are planned, but of course I don’t know how complete first version is going to be. Last time there was not parser nor e.g. networking done yet … we will see … hopefully soon enough …
I think that it could attract new programmers to Rebol. RT could later adopt some good ideas into their branch. We just need to be carefull to not starting turning Rebol into Perl or other language – it needs to stay with its own style.
-pekr-
For web-based applications, XUL is really great. It’s not as distributed as REBOL, but in networked server-centric environments, it’s great, and really free software, easy to program (XML, javascript, but also some python, perl, etc).
Unfortunately it has horrible doc’s.
I own both the Linux and Win32 SDK’s and have looked everywhere for decent /VIEW information. The people who are real Guru’s at REBOL can’t even tell you where to find the info. They just picked it up along the way.
With better documentation REBOL would be a killer app, but with what is available now, good luck to them keeping the business going.
“Do anyone know how powerful REBOL is?” The answer depends on what you mean by “powerful”. It is very powerful as a language – i.e. as a means to communicate. You can create and application much faster, than in other languages. You don’t have to learn any macro language, Rebol is its own meta/macro language.
OTOH, if you need a compiler producing super-fast number-crunching code, you are out of luck at present.
I don’t know how fast REBOL is, but I have downloaded and I am planning to install it this afternoon. From what I have seen in the example of code, it looks very easy than other languages.
Can REBOL view the HTML without required web server or something like remote client/server with the interface? I noticed that the encryptions aren’t freeware, so this is more like going to avoid me to sell product that is written in REBOL.
The one thing I find unusual about Rebol is that it’s very easy to describe GUI’s, diagrams or things using the View dialect, so if you’re trying to conceptualize a GUI for a C application, Rebol/View is nice.
The people you show it to, don’t need Rebol, as it can easily capture screenshots of its own windows and let you upload them as PNG to a developer website for further commenting, totally automatically… oh dear… had a few new ideas there. Have to go back to my Rebol console now. 🙂
“Can REBOL view the HTML without required web server or something like remote client/server with the interface?”
I’m not sure what you mean, but one thing about REBOL is that it allows you to download data and display it as a GUI using a powerful built-in state-machine parser. That can be part of a server/client relationship or just some descriptions stored on your disk.
I don’t think that it would be much of a problem writing an XML description of a REBOL GUI, and you can write your own HTML-engine if you like.
It can’t however grab your general HTML-engine from IE or Mozilla or whatever and integrate it into its own applications. Its GUI system is entirely internal, and the advantage to this is that I can sit and work out REBOL applications under Linux and run them without hiccups under Windows or Amiga or BeOS. What platform you use is not much of an issue. 🙂
The disadvantage to this is of course that it doesn’t integrate well with its underlying OS’ GUI. But the nature of REBOL applications don’t lead you towards that of huge applications such as Office packages, huge drawing programs.
REBOL is best with little lightweight tools. I can communicate with MySQL databases using a dialect, which comes in the form of a library at the size of a whooping 21 kB. 🙂
One other thing I really like about REBOL is that it is small, a few files, fits on a floppy and doesn’t require you to install a ton of external libraries (such as Python does).
“I noticed that the encryptions aren’t freeware, so this is more like going to avoid me to sell product that is written in REBOL.”
Yeah it probably is. But you can always design your own encryption support. This is of course quite a job, and no one as far as I know have done it yet. It should be possible though.
Thanks for answered all those stuff.. 🙂
What I am looking for is.. Something that can control the server stuff (web/mail/network and etc) solution by internal and internet. Current, I am using PHP to do those stuff and I am not really happy. PHP5 should be better, but I don’t want to depend on the Apache or some smaller web server tools that need to get PHP works.
So.. REBOL looks very nice and might be very nice solution for those, but I need to install and play with it first. I just need to see how REBOL’s remote client/server work.
Yeah it probably is. But you can always design your own encryption support. This is of course quite a job, and no one as far as I know have done it yet. It should be possible though.
True, but I prefer to use a ‘already’ secure encryption.. Let’s see how powerful REBOL is to allow me write the encrypt functions.
Oh btw: Please, do not tell me to use Java.. I do really hate Java and do not ask, peroid. 😉
“Lennart – you are wrong – you don’t need to sign royalty scheme, untill you charge for your apps, so you can use encapsulator and freely distribute your apps!”
Funny, I asked Cindy and Carl and I were told that I would need to sgin a royalty program if I wanted to distribute _anything_ encapsulated.
“open-source rebol version is supposed to be /Core clone released under GPL. In addition soft threading, extendability of language etc are planned, but of course I don’t know how complete first version is going to be. Last time there was not parser nor e.g. networking done yet … we will see … hopefully soon enough …”
R#, right? Got a link to a site for me?
“I think that it could attract new programmers to Rebol. RT could later adopt some good ideas into their branch. We just need to be carefull to not starting turning Rebol into Perl or other language – it needs to stay with its own style.”
Absolutely. I’d rather have REBOL remain 100% closed source than have it fork all over the place. Like I said, if RT puts shell access into REBOL/View I’ll be a happy camper and I wouldn’t see a need for an open source REBOL.
Commenting:
Well, XML once again. I just don’t seem to understand, why someone uses markup language for programming. Actually I am sorry but I think it can’t be compared with REBOL VID and style dialecting … once you will see more complicated rebol styles and how to “program” them using VID, you will how easy it is done.
—
Because you seem to miss the point.
XML is not used to code a programm. XML is used to describe a programm. XML is not the code, XML is its container.
And using something that is so close to HTML as is XML is not a bad idea for describing applications, that are easily called “services”. Just have a look at Mozilla/XUL…that is very nice. I describe the UI in XUL, add some inline code (it is all much like DHTML) and on every system one has Mozilla running I can “play” my application. Like Java, only MUCH easier to get accustomized into.
You still use ECMAScript, Python or Perl in order to write your actual code.
Similare is Windows Scripting Host.
I love that and believe, that this is the future, at least 50% of it.
In order to actually create your own Desktop with the code, it appears (for now at least) that you need to purchase the REBOL SDK. So for now, it’s “with-source”, perhaps not open-source.
From the press release, it looks like future /View versions may enable modifications to the desktop, but the details aren’t very clear at the moment.
Btw, I use SDK a lot, and while it takes a bit of twiddling to figure out, it’s well worth it. License issues aside, I’m very excited for the future of the SDK. Good job, RT.
Good news: according to the Readme.txt in the Desktop source, you **can** modify and run the Desktop in the free /View.
My apologies for the confusion.