Rebol Offers Cross-Platform Messaging

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July 09, 1998 (5:24 PM EDT)

By Andy Patrizio,

The Amiga faithful gathering in Sacramento, Calif., this weekend will be among the first to see Rebol, a new object-oriented programming language that could do for inter-platform messaging what Java did for cross-platform programming.

Rebol, which stands for Relative Expression-Based Object Language, is designed to be both platform and network protocol-independent. In creating applications, the programmer doesn't have to deal with any networking protocols, socket layers, or communications commands. It makes telling an application to send a file as simple as using a "send" command.

The Rebol language is the brainchild of Rebol Technologies CEO Carl Sassenrath, a former programmer with Apple and Commodore, who wrote the kernel of the Amiga operating system. Sassenrath founded his company in Ukiah, Calif., last year to begin development of the language specifically designed to ease the building of applications that communicate between systems.

"Rebol's whole focus is productivity: to allow someone with very little background in programming to sit down and do some pretty sophisticated programming functions, like sending messages back and forth between two machines, in very little time," Sassenrath said.

Rebol's primary use is for communicating between two different operating contexts. One machine can send messages or commands containing data and/or code to another machine, which can then respond. It's aimed at programmers using languages like Perl, Python, or Unix shell scripts.

Central to this is cross-platform support, since most networks are heterogeneous in nature, in particular the Internet. A PC needs the Rebol kernel, which is freely distributed, in order to receive messages from another and respond. This is similar to the Java Virtual Machine requirement for running Java applications.

A Rebol kernel is planned for Amiga, BeOS, BSD Unix, Linux, Macintosh, Psion, Solaris, other Unix variants and Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT.

Some have questioned Rebol's scalability and wonder who will adopt it, but Rebol could gain some acceptance among low-end application programmers, according to Zona Research analyst Ron Rappaport. "The question is, how broad an application base is this language appropriate for, and how many programmers will look at it as tinker toys," he said.

Rebol Technologies plans to release Rebol/Share, the shareware kernel component, by late summer and Rebol/Core, a supported version, by early fall. The products will be distributed over the Internet and directly from the company. Development tools will eventually follow, but since Rebol is a cross-platform language, code can be written in a text editor, said Sassenrath.