User “Bogomips” on the forum has found that our SDL subsystem on Syllable Desktop doesn't support PNG images yet. We tracked the problem to the SDL-Image component and found TIFF image support missing, as well. We have published a fixed resource package for SDL-Image that you need to port modern SDL programs or to run programs ported by others. Installing this will not remove the SDL-Image in the system, but will override it. Although JPEG (and GIF) images already worked, you need to install the new LibJPEG package, too. This is now a shared library, and used by SDL-Image.

Since SDL-Image is missing from the current Syllable Desktop development build, you can also use these packages to fix that.

In the process, we published new packages for LibPNG, GIFLib and LibTIFF, that you can use to develop or port software. Finally, we made a package for the Pig example game.

Syllable now has its first separate REBOL binding. The current version of REBOL 3 for Syllable interfaces with the system at the POSIX level. Beyond that, you can write your own bindings with system and user libraries. Bindings are written as REBOL 3 extensions. We have created a binding with the popular cURL library, which is included in Syllable as its networking library.

Interestingly, and just like the core REBOL 3 interpreter library, Syllable Desktop can run the Linux binary of the binding unchanged, so that the same binary can be shared between Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server. This is possible because the interfaces between REBOL 3 and its extensions are designed for maximal portability, to avoid dependency hell. Downloads and documentation for the cURL binding are available here. We will be demonstrating the binding at the upcoming REBOL & Boron conference.

The website for the ReBorCon 2011 that Bas is organising is now available. ReBorCon is a new, international conference for the REBOL family of programming languages, including the current REBOL 2 line, the REBOL 3 in development, and the open source Boron language. The programme includes several topics that are of interest for Syllable.

The third edition of the Syllable Winter Conference will take place in the Netherlands on Saturday the 29th of January, in conference centre "Het Brandpunt" in Baarn. We will demonstrate setting up Syllable Server as a web/FTP/SSH server, making a website on Syllable Desktop, and building it and uploading it to Syllable Server with REBOL 3. This will show REBOL 3 and a new cURL binding for it on Syllable Desktop. Further, we hope to have another goodie for the visitors, to take home.

To give you an impression of the conference, you can see the more than seventy Dutch spoken videos on YouTube of the presentations given during the first Syllable Winter Conference in 2009 (playlist), the second Syllable Winter Conference in 2010 (playlist) and the fourth Syllable Summer Conference in 2010 (playlist).

For information about the conference, contact Bas de Lange on the email address mentioned here.

During the SylCon Summer conference 2010 we filmed the presentations given. It took a while to process them, but thanks to skûtsje shipper Paul Fortuijn (who took the time of processing all the movies) now they are finally available on YouTube. If you want to view the movies in Ogg video format, use this website: TinyOgg.com.

Topics covered include the Syllable Server release 0.4, the new graphical development version of Syllable Server, advancements in REBOL 3, improvements in our CMS and how we will open up our communication channels. The movies are Dutch spoken. If you want to help making translations and sub-titles of these videos please contact Bas de Lange on the email address mentioned here.

We wish everyone a good Syllable year! Last year we promised to create some breakthroughs, and we did. After making the REBOL 3 and Boron programming languages available on both Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server, we started working on their closer integration with the system. We created the first REBOL extension on Syllable, and will soon announce the first binding with a programming library. We made the REBOL 3 collaboration system and the CMS for the Syllable web sites run on Desktop. The CMS became more capable and fifteen times faster, so that it is now much easier for us to maintain the sites. We made a new Syllable Server release, and created a graphical version of it with the ROX desktop, that we are using internally and that has enabled us to move away from non-Syllable Linux distributions (extending our hardware's life span in the process).

Most of these accomplishments are "under the hood". We demonstrated them on the Syllable Conferences and on Software Freedom Day, but they are not easily available yet. So the main goal for this year is to continue with these developments and to make them better available to the public.

The new version 3 of the REBOL programming language supports extensions written in other languages. Extensions are implemented on top of the modules framework, which is also new. Extensions can be separate dynamically loaded libraries, or they can be embedded in the REBOL executable. In fact, REBOL 3 is now highly modularised: a number of its subsystems are embedded modules, and subsystems written in C and C++ are embedded extensions. Those modules and extensions are part of the open host kit, so that custom collections can be compiled into REBOL executables.

Syllable is now running its first REBOL extension. It's an example extension in the style of the traditional Hello World that shows the ease of interfacing. It works without changes on both Desktop and Server. The source code is in Builder. To compile and load the extension on Syllable Desktop, do the following. See the previous article for the requirements.

    build update
    build log
    build get HelloREBOL-Extension--current
    build patch HelloREBOL-Extension--current
    build HelloREBOL-Extension--current
    cd HelloREBOL-Extension--current
    r3
    import %./hello-extension.so
    hello
    goodbye

The latest version of the REBOL 3 open host kit, alpha 110, enables Syllable Desktop for the first time to run the REBOL 3 client/server RebDev collaboration application for chat and development files sharing. It already worked in the Linux version for Syllable Server. The client is not an application that was ported and needs to be installed, but is a small REBOL script that is downloaded in its newest version every time the program is started - much like a web page. It runs unmodified, currently on Syllable Desktop, Syllable Server, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Amiga OS (PPC), OS X (Intel & PPC) and Windows.

The source code of the REBOL 3 open host environment is now hosted in a public Git version management repository. To compile REBOL 3 on Syllable Desktop, you need to have the following software packs installed:

    - Development files pack for your exact Syllable version
    - Developer's Delight
    - Network Necessities

To compile REBOL 3 and start the RebDev application, enter the following commands:

    build update
    build log
    build get REBOL-Core--current
    build patch REBOL-Core--current
    build REBOL-Core--current
    build install REBOL-Core--current
    r3
    chat
    new-user

Bas is organising a conference for the REBOL family of programming languages, including the current REBOL 2 line, the REBOL 3 in development, and the open source Boron language. The conference will be held on Saturday February 26 in the Netherlands, in the same venue as the Syllable conferences. Many of the demonstrations will be done on Syllable Server and Syllable Desktop.

We will set up a website for the conference later, but we want to get the word out as soon as possible to gauge interest. If we get international visitors, we have the option to scale up the event to multiple days, including the Friday, to make the journey worth their while. So if you are contemplating coming, or even better if you are interested to give a presentation or demonstration or workshop, please contact Bas de Lange.

The website is now on-line.

Kaj has upgraded the Try REBOL website so that it offers the Boron programming language for testing, instead of ORCA, its predecessor. So you can now try Boron in your browser, without installing it. The site uses the Boron version that is included in Syllable Server 0.4, which the site is running on.

Kaj has overhauled the Boron demonstration he presented at Software Freedom Day for publication on the web. Boron is the programming language that is the successor to the ORCA language that we use in Syllable. If you want to try it, Boron is already available in Syllable Server 0.4 and the development build of Syllable Desktop.

The presentation starts with an introduction to Boron. It then demonstrates how to build a small dynamic website that serves up the presentation itself. So there is a simple website content management system in there and a simple presentation program, in about fourty lines of Boron programming. Both the program and the presentation are available for download.

The demonstration is running on Syllable Server and the Cheyenne web server, just like the original talk at Software Freedom Day. It could also run on Syllable Desktop by using one of the web servers available for Desktop.

Friday September 17, Kaj will present two talks at the Software Freedom Day 2010. This event is kindly hosted by the CWI in Amsterdam, the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, known best in open source circles as the birthplace of Python.

The first talk presents our graphical development version of Syllable Server running the ROX Desktop, which we recently introduced at the Syllable Summer Conference, and compares it to Syllable Desktop.

The second presentation introduces the Boron programming language, which is the successor to the ORCA language that we use in Syllable. It will demonstrate building a small website with Boron on the Cheyenne web server, also running on Syllable Server.

Saturday 4th of September 2010 the fourth edition of the Syllable Summer Conference will take place in conference centre "Het Brandpunt" in Baarn. We will present the new Syllable Server 0.4 (more info about edition 0.4), updates in our graphical development version of Syllable Server (which we showed during Syllable Winter Conference 2010, see the videos down below). Attention will also be paid to advancements in REBOL 3, continued improvements in our CMS and how we will also open up our communication channels.

To give you an impression of the conference, you can see the more than twenty Dutch spoken videos on YouTube of the presentations given by Kaj de Vos during the first Syllable Winter Conference in January 2009 (playlist) and the second Syllable Winter Conference in January 2010 (playlist).

If you want to help with making subtitles and translations of these videos please contact Bas de Lange on the here mentioned email address!

Saturday 30th of January 2010 already the second edition of the Syllable Winter Conference will take place in conference centre "Het Brandpunt" in Baarn. Like we did during the first Syllable summer conference with presenting Syllable Server and our WebKit based browser Webster, we will now also make some important announcements. During several presentations and demonstrations we will highlight these. We will also follow up on the content management system, with which you can manage websites on Syllable Server. In this context we will go more indepth into the Try REBOL site, with which you can try out the REBOL programming language in your browser. The recently implemented support for WebSockets on Cheyenne, part of the upcoming HTML5 web standards, with which persistent HTTP connections in an efficient manner become possible, and with that the management of rich interactive websites on Syllable Server, will of course extensively be highlighted. Keep an eye on the Syllable Winter Conference page for the latest updates to the programme.

To give you an impression of the conference, you can see here six Dutch spoken videos on YouTube of the presentations given by Kaj de Vos during the first Syllable Winter Conference in January 2009.

Part 1, deep links into the video: Syllable Desktop, memory management, swap, why do we use Linux as a server kernel?, the using of Syllable in a DVD factory.
Part 2, deep links: WebKit, mounting USB disks, terminal Bash shell, installing extra packages, Battle for Wesnoth, native applications, resource packages, VLC media player, Application Binary Interface.
Part 3, deep links: Unix System Resources, resources directory, symbolic links, no hard links, locality of packages.
Part 4, deep links: search paths, separation of system and independent packages, playing a movie with VLC.
Part 5, deep links: VLC, MediaPlayer, FFMPEG, media framework, hardware overlays, media codecs.
Part 6, deep links: the REBOL song, audio mixing.

If you want to help with making subtitles and translations of these videos please get in contact with Bas de Lange on the here mentioned email address!

Over the holidays, the Cheyenne web server that we use in Syllable Server got a WebSocket framework. Cheyenne's author Nenad Rakocevic implemented WebSocket support in just a day on top of the UniServe universal network I/O subsystem that underpins Cheyenne. In a few more days, he designed an original WebSocket framework supporting persistent connections in an efficient manner, extending the regular Cheyenne framework for the typical HTTP stateless request/response communication.

WebSocket is a part of the upcoming HTML5 web standards. It allows a web browser and a web server to have a persistent, two-way full-duplex connection using just one TCP connection. It does this by starting a regular HTTP connection and then effectively renegotiating it into its more flexible underlying TCP connection. This gives it good chances to traverse firewalls, effectively giving us back the full power of the Internet. In this way, it is an evolution and replacement of Comet, which is a collection of hacks to use Ajax to simulate persistent HTTP connections. WebSocket improves over Comet by being standardised, much cleaner and more scalable. It does, however, require explicit support by both the server and the client. Currently, only Chrome 4 has WebSocket support. It is planned for Firefox and Safari. The latter means WebKit and that means we will be able to port it to Webster.

We intend to use this framework in our Syllable web infrastructure. The Cheyenne WebSocket framework is available in its SVN version. A WebSocket echo demo program is available here.

There is now a demo chat application online. Remember that you need a WebSocket browser for it, such as Chrome 4 or a nightly build of WebKit. You can follow Cheyenne discussions here.

We wish you all a good new year! The new sun is shining strong here, surely the sign of a fertile year to come. Indeed, we will create some breakthroughs this year.

Early this year, we reported that the alpha versions of REBOL 3 ran on Syllable Server, based on the unmodified Linux version. Now we have even better news. R3 has been split into its planned core interpreter library and an open source host environment for integration with as many systems as possible. Kaj has got this version to work on Syllable Desktop. This is the first time that a version of REBOL can run there (besides emulating a complete operating system), so this is a major step towards our REBOL cross-platform strategy.

Interestingly, this R3 version is not fully native to Syllable yet and is not fully ported. The open host environment has been compiled on Syllable, but is using the binary Linux version of the core interpreter library. Normally, this is impossible, but it works in this case through a trick. Both Linux and Syllable use the GNU GLibC C library, but the porting layer and the internal library versions are different. Providing symlinks from the Linux library versions to the Syllable versions makes this work. This is exceptional and is a testament both to Syllable's compatibility with Linux and to the excellent isolation the host environment achieves between REBOL 3 and the host platform.

The current development build of Syllable Desktop has a greatly improved installation menu. The options for IDE and USB CD players were merged, so that the troubleshooting options can now also be tried with a USB CD player. Specific installation options were added for the Acer Aspire One and ASUS EeePC netbooks. The EeePC requires compensation for its shifting of drive positions, which is now performed by the installer. This was tested for us by Hans Rood on the Summer SylCon, and the Aspire One was tested for us by Ruud Kuin. There are now more safe mode options for troubleshooting, such as an option to fully remove the USB 2 driver, which is buggy on some systems.

Experimental installation options were added for installing from and to USB memory sticks. These don't work yet, because Syllable doesn't start from USB devices other than CD players yet, but this is being worked on. Apart from Syllable's own AFS format, there's an option for starting from USB memory formatted with Linux's Ext2FS file system. Installing to USB is still unreliable on Syllable, so the Ext2FS option allows to experiment with creating a USB installation medium from Linux.

At a request from Carl Sassenrath, inventor of REBOL and the Amiga OS, Kaj has created a website that allows you to try the REBOL programming language without installing it. The site showcases the new REBOL version 3 that is close to going into beta release. It also offers to test the classic REBOL 2 and ORCA, the open source implementation of REBOL, and to make comparisons between them.

The website is running on Syllable Server 0.3, in development towards version 0.4. For this application, the security of the server operating system was enhanced to be able to offer the public to run generic REBOL scripts.

The website was made on top of the REBOL stack included in Syllable Server. It runs on the Cheyenne web server. It is made in a Model/View/Controller architecture with the network application platform we have been working on: a combination of the QuarterMaster web framework and the content management system that is also used to build our Syllable websites. This REBOL demo site marks the transition of this application platform to being capable of building advanced interactive websites.

At the request of our Spanish web master, Lucas Murad from Argentina, and Leo Ruilova, from Chile, Kristian has opened a section for Spanish speaking Syllable fans on our forum. Do come in and say hello to them!

Our yearly summer conference will be held from Saturday July 18 to Saturday July 25 in the Netherlands. We will be sailing again on the Frisian vessel the Stêd Sleat while discussing and demoing the Syllable systems. This year we are offering several arrangements, so you can choose how many days you want to attend. There are discounts for longer stays and for kids, so you can make this into a nice vacation for your family. Contact Bas for arrangements.

The news sections of the websites have been extended with RSS feeds. If you prefer to follow Syllable news through an RSS reader application, you can now do so. Each selection of the news on the different sites has a corresponding feed. Look for the RSS icons. Please don't let your reader fetch the feeds too often. We don't publish news several times per day, so it's no use to check more often than a few times each day. Each news article now also has its own page, so the feeds can point to them. Good reading!

Kristian has implemented asynchronous input/output. This has been tested with QEmu, which shows increased performance both due to this and the also new implementation of memory-mapped files. A development build with async I/O is already available. Other recent enhancements it includes are automatic log-in without password and installation by keyboard only, without needing a mouse.

Async I/O is implemented as a native POSIX interface. The available functions are aio_read() and aio_write(). In addition, the asynchronous case for msync() in memory-mapped files is now supported. In Syllable 0.6.6, async I/O is simulated in the GNU C library and executed synchronously. This was enough to make QEmu work, but now async I/O is actually implemented through a syscall kernel interface.

Originally, Syllable relied solely on pervasive multithreading for its exceptional responsiveness. A few years ago, a new scheduler was introduced that is more suitable to desktop use than the original round-robin scheduler. Async I/O will further enhance responsiveness in ported applications that use it.

After Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 already brought a number of improvements to standards support, Kristian has now implemented the POSIX interface to memory-mapped files. Ever more software requires this functionality. Both the interfaces for memory-backed files and anonymous memory maps are supported. Syllable has always used memory-mapped files for its in-kernel ELF loader, so the POSIX interface is implemented on top of this. A development build going towards Syllable 0.6.7 is already available, in which several components should make use of mmap.

The mmap(), munmap(), mprotect() and msync() functions are implemented. In the process, Kristian fixed some bugs in the underlying memory management implementation in the kernel. One of the next planned implementations of standard interfaces is async I/O, among other things for completing the mmap support. Further, it was determined that the time is nearing that the syscall interface needs to change from int 0x80 to SYSENTER/SYSCALL. mmap() is the kernel's first syscall with six arguments, requiring extensions to the syscall table and strace(). The newer SYSENTER interface is needed to fully support this and 64-bits arguments, also for a future 64-bits port of Syllable.

There is a tendency in much open source software in recent years to require advanced features of the host platform, that are only available on the major systems; sometimes only on Linux. This is problematic for alternative operating systems and undermines the portability of open source and the diversity and choice of platforms. Through the addition of the mmap interface, we hope to gain access to such software as GCC beyond the 4.1 versions, Gnash, Cherokee and maybe PostgreSQL. Software that will perform better includes FreeType, SDL and DOSBox.

There's a release candidate for Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 in our development builds now. If you want to influence the final version, this is your last chance to test it.

If you think the news articles here are out of line, that's because the web sites got a brand-new news module. Custom made for Syllable, just as the rest of the site. However, the older news items are still in the old style, which is less flexible, so we can't easily update their styling. The new articles are in our custom database and have their content fully decoupled from the styling. They're also easier to write and maintain. It's an important focus of ours to lighten our workload.

Public versions have been released of the current alpha version of REBOL 3 for Linux and Mac OS X. Like the private version of a year ago, the Linux version runs on Syllable Server. These versions are currently comparable to REBOL/Core 2, without the graphical system, and can be downloaded through here.

If you have an Internet connection, the new Graphical User Interface of REBOL 3 and a set of demo programs can be loaded from the R3 command shell by typing:

    demo

    load-gui
    view [button "Test" do [print "OK"]]

After a long series of development releases over the past year that were only available to a limited group of REBOL developers, an alpha preview release of REBOL 3 has now been posted publicly. REBOL is an important part of our cross-platform strategy, so this is great news. The current preview release is for Windows and doesn't include the graphics system yet, but it will run on WINE. It contains infrastructure for further development in the form of upgrade and chat commands. The latter connects you to a communication system that can also be viewed from the web, in a form meant for mobile devices. The goal is to get more contributors involved. Please read the introduction documentation.