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Offline henrikmk

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Re: REBOL 3 Released for AmigaOS
« Reply #14 from previous page: November 01, 2010, 09:17:55 AM »
Quote from: AmigaEd;588073
I've been playing with it a bit, it looks like the Win version on Rebol 3 is still an Alpha release and I think it only operates at the console level. No Gui yet. (If I'm wrong on this, please correct me.)

Rebol 2.7 View (the graphical version) seems to work nicely. I've been messing a bit with it, but haven't had a chance to dig too deep as I'm swamped with other projects.

Regards,
AmigaEd


The windows version is currently the primary platform for REBOL 3 testing, simply because it has the most completed parts. The development is largely split in:

1. Core work (language, booting, modules, extensions), which is done by Carl and expert helpers.
2. The hostkit, which is Carl and the community of a few expert developers (one is Steve Solie), to oversee porting of REBOL 3 to other platforms, while doing code auditing and design changes.
3. GUI work and graphics engine by a third party company, RM Asset, where I work. We want to use the GUI for building viable business applications, so it has to be much stronger than it was for REBOL 2.

The hostkit is what needs to be completed to allow the graphics engine to work on other platforms than Windows, so that's our next big step.
 

Offline henrikmk

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Re: REBOL 3 Released for AmigaOS
« Reply #15 on: November 01, 2010, 10:01:25 AM »
Quote from: AmigaEd;587585
However, some of it is not clear to me. For example...

1. What does Rebol 3 bring to the table in terms of aiding the user (as opposed to the developer) that Rebol 2 did not?


REBOL 3 is a from-scratch rewrite. REBOL 3 fixes a ton of small design flaws in REBOL 2 that is observed and collected over 10 years of use. Using more clever designs for many functions, the language overall runs 50-100% faster, although its new bottom-up unicode implementation makes text handling more complex, slower and takes more memory. However it uses less memory in general, due to its more modular design, allowing you to not load parts of REBOL that you don't need.

The graphics handling is much lighter and faster, implemented as a general model of graphical objects (GOBs), which currently is coupled with Anti-Grain Graphics (AGG) as the rasterizer. The coupling can be replaced with an OpenGL rasterization or a different one, if desired.

R2 also had two graphics engines, one for GUI work and AGG for general graphics, like drawing graphs, etc. R3 uses only AGG for everything, so we now have anti-aliased fonts everywhere.

It also implements rich text, which was impossible to do properly in R2.

Ports are totally asynchronous and much simpler, thus allowing much higher performance, which was a weak point in REBOL 2. Where before you had to make use of undocumented async features, these are now documented and standardized.

The modular design allows it to be used inside other programs as a DLL. It has a device model that may allow it to sit directly on top of a kernel without any other OS environment, thus you could theoretically build your own desktop around it. :-)

It also implements multithreading, but this feature is very OS dependent, thus not yet completed and is unstable. Cooperative threading is possible in R2, but it requires hundreds of lines of code and is slower.

Some new core functions allow it to restrict how much memory is used, so it will work better in embedded environments and on webservers like Apache.

It also has an open sourced coupling between OS and REBOL kernel, and also a more open license, which makes developers safer in case REBOL Technologies goes belly up.

There is much more, but this is what I can list for now.

Quote
2. Can Rebol be used in implementing a Website? i.e. in other words can it be used as an analog of jsp pages or perhaps similar to Javascript?


Yes and no. It doesn't replace client side javascript, since that is inherently married to the browser, although an experimental plugin was made a few years ago that allowed direct DOM manipulation. It was very interesting to work with in the pre-web2.0 days. :-)

But since R2 lacks certain security features, that R3 has, this plugin was never finished. But server-side, it's a joy to work with and you can write much smaller code than, say, with PHP.

A new plugin may be made later with R3, but I'm not sure.

Quote
3. Let's say you have Rebol core running on a server, can it actually serve up dynamic content?


You need a webserver for this, where there are a few available (one is 16 kb of code: http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=volkswebserv.r). The one I use, and is the most popular one, is Cheyenne, which basically consists of an executable and a configuration file.

Then you write pages in .rsp, which is basically REBOL code that can be intermixed with regular HTML code.

On top of this, I wrote an HTML dialect which generates all HTML code for me, so I never have to write any HTML code, and it takes up about 30-50% of the HTML code I would otherwise have to write.

Then there is automatic document generation using REBOL's unofficial MakeDoc standard (similar to LaTeX in philosophy, only vastly simpler in function), and all documents are on-the-fly converted to prettier HTML from plain text files.

My website:

http://97.107.135.89/www.hmkdesign.dk/index.rsp?page=about

I must apologize for it being so slow, as the site is not yet in production mode, because various debugging features are enabled and excessive amounts of code is loaded, every time you view a page. :-)

Also, take a look at QTask, a collaboration website. The entire backbone is implemented in REBOL 2.

Quote
4. If it is possible to use Rebol in developing dynamic content, such as an interactive form tied to a database, does there have to be an instance of Rebol View on the client or is a browser plug in required or is the dynamic content presented to the client browser in such a way that nothing else is needed beyond Rebol core residing on the server?


See responses above for clues, but there are not really point-and-click tools available, if you want to build websites in REBOL. Also you would need a host who accepts REBOL to be running, which most standard hosts don't allow, so REBOLers resort to VPS hosts, like Linode, Slicehost or Amazon.

Strictly, if you want to really start from scratch as a fun challenge, you can implement a webserver in a few kb of code and use it to serve basic pages, but it's not asynchronous, and so may be a little easy to knock over without a process manager, like Cheyenne has.

But you can get along just fine without a database, as long as you don't need to serve millions of accounts or gigabytes of data.
 

Offline AmigaEd

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Re: REBOL 3 Released for AmigaOS
« Reply #16 on: November 06, 2010, 03:08:50 PM »
@Henrik,

Hello and thank you for all of the very detailed responses you have provided to my earlier questions. I must say I'm really still trying to wrap my brain around the whole concept of Rebol and it's going to take me a bit to digest everything you have written.

I have been working a little bit with Rebol and I'm slowly learning. I think I just need to get more "hands-on" time with it.

Regards,
AmigaEd
"Pretty soon they will have numbers tattooed on our foreheads." - Jay Miner 1990

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Offline number6

Re: REBOL 3 Released for AmigaOS
« Reply #17 on: April 10, 2011, 08:05:25 PM »
Quote from: ssolie;586991
REBOL 3 has just been released for the AmigaOS 4.1 and can be downloaded from the alpha downloads section.

REBOL 3 is currently in alpha and so is the Amiga version. Please read the documentation on the REBOL site for more information.

For those without AmigaOS you can also try REBOL 3 on a variety of other platforms or even directly on the web.

Note that a Host-Kit for REBOL 3 is still in development which will greatly extend what can be done with REBOL on the Amiga so stay tuned.




"A new Amiga could potentially lead to renewed interest in Carl's projects..."

"Nice to see that. I'm a big fan of open source and have been a Linux user since 2000.

They could be on to a winner here, retro is very cool."

REBOL Forum

Always good to keep up with what goes on with Carl's baby, too.

#6
 

Offline Templario

Re: REBOL 3 Released for AmigaOS
« Reply #18 on: April 10, 2011, 09:22:12 PM »
But, what I can programing with it? Games, tools, demos, programs.
Amiga 500 with ROMs 1.3-2.05 and M-Tec AT 500 with hard disk and 4MB Ram.
WinUAE + Original OS 3.5&3.9
Sam440ep 800 MHZ + OS 4.1 F.E.
Sam460ex 1 GHz + OS 4.1 + Update 6. K.O.
MacMini 1.5 GHz + MorphOS 3.9
PowerBook G4 1.65 + MorphOS 3.9