The Rebol Viewtop
Rebol View provides a desktop GUI - the viewtop. The viewtop provides a vital first impression, a chance to showcase the potential of the Rebol language. The viewtop does quite well as a convenient method of writing and organizing scripts.
Can a revised viewtop better illustrate the flexibility of Rebol as a language and how Rebol might be used as a platform for distributed computer communication?
Consider the task of skinning the viewtop as an example of Rebol flexibility. How many skins have been put forward? One - titled "Desktop", the file %active-viewtop.r, entered to the script library 2005-08-31 and authored by "RT & Ingo Hohmann. As Rebol is indeed an extremely flexible and elegant language, perhaps there are more viewtops.
The source code of the viewtop has been made available (and can also be gained by typing mold ctx-viewtop at the console).
The collection of Rebsites is an interesting conglomeration - but it may also be useful to build a more focused network, or provide an example of business or scientific networks to demonstrate Rebol's distributed computing capabilities.
This first viewtop skin illustrated below is an incomplete work, a bad hack at best, but it does provide a starting point or perhaps an incentive for others to do better. I hope that they may post their viewtops below this one and that in time a consensus of what a better viewtop ought to be may develop.
This viewtop includes major services like the Cheyenne web server and the Altme messaging application.
From the top bar one may currently set preferences, change to the console mode, and open the editor. A provision for the Cheyenne web server and Altme have also been made but as yet are not functional. Both Cheyenne and Altme can be opened from the list of scripts and applications in the main body of the layout.
Changes to the original script include:
1. To simplify the layout, only one icon was chosen to represent files and folders, applications and scripts. The data of the icon image provides the text for each item. Currently, new items and edits to existing items are done with the editor - but a script could be written for this.
2. Some items were given new names that may be more descriptive, hopefully making the reading of the script a bit easier.
3. The initialization of items was removed. This viewtop script runs from the user.r file.
4. Images not used were removed from the script.
5. The earth image used instead is from NASA, a USA government image.
The script for the illustrated viewtop will be presented here in the near future.
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The version of Rebol that includes GUI libraries has been historically called "Rebol/View". Included in the distribution is a function called viewtop, which starts a simple browser application that lets you run sample Rebol programs from some trusted network locations.
The viewtop is able to get its index of demos from any file or URL, however the default is:
>> viewtop http://rebol.com/index.r
By using an unset! optional parameter, it is possible to subvert Rebol's usual requirement that a function take a fixed number of parameters and merely type:
>> viewtop
- Note that this trick can only be used on the last operation in a series of commands, and is intended only for functions designed for usage in interactive mode!
- TODO: Talk about the security issues related to running these scripts off the network, and how to check to make sure security is set and working.