Thursday, September 13, 2007

Cool Curl 'live' code widget

Over at eclectic-pencil I have a post on a very cool Curl widget that rivals almost anything I have ever seen expand and collapse on a web page.

What I neglect to mention is that in the example, the only code to create the XMl tree is this:
   let xmldoc:XDMDocument =
{build-xml preserve-whitespace? = false, loc}
|| ...
{XDMTreeControl open? = true, xmldoc.root}

Which you would be hard-pressed to beat in Seaside for Smalltalk or in Groovy. Concise.

TiScript also has an alternative DOM and some nice features as a JavaScript alternative, but Curl 5.0 is a mature, full RIA product with 'live' code for inspection and a focus on the client-side. It is almost Smalltalk but it was also built for the web (in fairness, Curl goes about as far back as Smalltalk VisualWave.)

The only cool but alive technologies as neglected as Curl 5.0 must be Gemstone/S and Rebol 2.6.3 ... and the latter is soon to be 2.7.x with 3.0 in the wings ...

Watch for a Seaside for Gemstone/S beta in the news soon ...

PS For people living on AIR and FLASH, Rebol/FLASH went 2.0 today ...

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Curl and Occasionally Connected Computing

I have added a page on OCC at wikipedia. What is really interesting to me is the use of a custom URI scheme in Curl. Such a scheme might be
curl://occ/this-redirects-as-needed
which could be used to redirect to a resource depending on whether the user is connected.
If you have experience with OCC, please do contribute to the article. When I have some experience with Curl OCC I will add a page at eclectic-pencil with details and caveats.
To complement the article, I also opened one on CSPD. There are trolls at en.wikipedia.org who delight in suggesting page deletions so your contributions to articles to maintain NPOV or to suggest sensible article merging and separation are much appreciated. No edit wars, please. Solid references for articles are usually the key to survival of any given contribution in my experience.