I recently stumbled across REBOL <www.rebol.com> and was reminded of Richard Gaskin's "Beyond the Browser" article http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/NetApps.html an earlier post which I made to the metacard email list about a "web portal," and news that Runtime is coming out with a Revolution "player" soon.
Rebol has platform-independent scripts (simple text files containing script with .r extension) run by platform-specific engines. The script is purported by a couple examples to be "natural language-like" but inspection of a few scripts proves otherwise. UI controls are non-native, though there is a "WinSkin" option. There is even a "Rebol for Dummies" book. "Rebol/View" is a "player" that opens a window or "desktop" with the general layout of a Windows directory. See screen shot at bottom of the page http://www.rebol.com/pre-view.html Icons are links to Rebol directories on the web and scripts which download and run locally. Looks nice but has rough edges: it wanted to re-install the engine for every script downloaded and then, after I deleted these extra engines, the remaining engine spawned 5 copies of itself spontaneously on next startup! The "R" icon on the Rebol/View desktop uses a font *very* similar to Rev's icon. No "orbit" like Rev but has a background that actively swirls during downloads like the top-right icon of IE and Netscape. There are links to demo scripts (I keep starting to type "stacks") at the Rebol site AND a link to the "world wide reb" i.e., directories with scripts at contributors sites (Gee, "world wide rev"!). One idea that I liked was an "index.r" file in each published directory that lists, in Rebol script syntax, subdirectories, scripts that can be run, and links. If the Rev player does include a "portal" to stacks published on the internet, how about a index.rev stack that, when accessed, executes a script that returns a list of subdirectories and stacks in its directory. Maybe there's no need to type entries into a index file, the index stack script can get the contents (just keep private stacks out of the directory). Rev could post a copy of the index.rev stack that contributors could put into their own directories with stacks they want to publish. Of course, there are security issues associated with letting people use an official Rev player to access stacks outside Rev on the net (probably decency issues too). Maybe the player could switch to secure mode to prevent disk access when the user wants to venture outside the Rev "orbit"? (Got to get "world wide reb" out of my brain!) At the very least, being able to download and execute stacks will be a much better marketing tool than static screen shots. The time of the "Net app" (per R. Gaskin) is here with new MC/Rev implementations - and hopefully with the new Rev player. Rich Herz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> my blip of a net app experiment at http://mechanics.ucsd.edu/research/herz/web_test/ which, by the way, will need some tuning to run under a MC 2.4 engine, for some reason - got to learn more about libURL...
