The dizzying lines of computer code beneath an application can only be described generously as a "language." Recognizing this, a new company has designed a language for Web applications that uses English syntax to make programming a simpler science.
On Thursday, Rebol Technologies debuted Rebol, which allows simple language to perform sophisticated tasks. With Rebol, webmasters can add fancy data-processing tricks to their menu of services.
Rebol "puts the programming power and power of computing back in the hands of people who want it -- which is the people that use the computers," said Rebol spokesman Mike Teeling.
Mundane yet potent Web scripting languages play an important role in letting Web sites gather and process information. But this power is mostly reserved today for companies employing programmers conversant in languages like C++ and Perl, Teeling says. Rebol is more accessible, the company says, because it speaks an English-like language, using "expressions" to perform functions that are recognizable for their English-like syntax.
Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, one of the most popular Web scripting languages today, sees Rebol as just one more way to do something useful. "I'd say the more, the merrier. Perl has a slogan: There's more than one way to do it," says Wall. "If people want to use Rebol for whatever it's good for and Perl for what it's good for [that's fine]. I'd want to look at how can we get them working together."
After taking a brief look at Rebol, Wall thinks the new language and Perl may actually have different strong suits. "It looks like [Rebol] is more for sending messages around among applications. Perl can be used for that, but tends to be used more for heavy-duty text processing."
Rebol is the product of Carl Sassenrath, the man who wrote the operating system software for the Amiga computer in the 1980s. His OS was a model of efficiency for its time, given the minimal memory and hardware performance of the hardware.
Efficiency is a key feature of his latest creation, as well. Scripting applications written in the language are reduced from thousands of lines of code, which is typical, to mere hundreds.
"All other programming and scripting languages are computer-centric languages," Sassenrath said in a statement. "Rebol, on the other hand, is human-centric. The introduction of Rebol heralds a new era in which people control their computers, not the other way around."
Server-side scripting languages exchange information between a Web server and another program running on another computer on the server's network. The database or other application can then send back information that can be transformed into HTML and published on a Web site.
Its efficiency for Internet use is also boosted by being Internet-native, Rebol says. It directly handles primary Internet protocols for email, the Web, and the file transfer protocol. In beta testing for the past 10 months, the language has seen a grassroots following of network administrators, educators, webmasters, and computer enthusiasts spring up, Rebol says.
The company will also be encouraging the development of third-party applications built around Rebol.
Rebol will be accessible to most platforms, including AmigaOS, Linux for Intel, Macintosh, Solaris Unix, and all versions of Windows. Versions are also planned for other variations of Linux and Unix as well as the BeOS. Mathew Ignash, the leader of the Amiga faction of the Michigan Computer User Group, thinks Rebol could play a big role as well in plugging odd, but beloved, computer platforms into company networks.
"It's a wonderful thing for people who have multiple platforms, which means that people who have the odd system out -- an Amiga or Macintosh -- [won't] be excluded from important network applications."
Rebol is free and available for download at the company's site.
