IBM’s programming and scripting language, REXX, may have achieved a unique range of supported platforms, with success on everything from the Commodore Amiga to OS/2 to IBM mainframes. Over the years, REXX gained object-oriented features, and turned into Object Rexx, with programming interfaces to DB2, C, and C++ applications. A few weeks ago, IBM quietly released Object Rexx to the open source community. RexxLA — the REXX Language Association — targeting the first release of Open Object REXX for early 2005.
IBM Releases Object Rexx as Open Source
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Eugenia Loli
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That’s all I have to say.
Arexx, that I remember, was quite popular, and
quite a lot of advanced programs provided Arexx interfaces.
I do not remeber rexx being used as widely on the PC side,
but maybe I was just well informed back then.
The sheer amount of work being dumped in the open source form it’s just, well, odd.
A year ago the stats still showed this the most widely used language.
You know I had this on Amiga, but never got around to learning it. It seems somewhat dangerous te me now to let a script control running applications like that. Especially these days with plenty of worms/viri/spyware floating around.
“he sheer amount of work being dumped in the open source form it’s just, well, odd.”
does firefox and openoffice count as dumping too?
I used to read a french magazine called St magazine (firts St mag then Sixtheen thirty two mag) and there were a lot of cool hobbyist articles and one of them dealt with arex port…
it look terrible to see you can control Deluxe Paint in basic, it was possible to create pictures in photo paint, add some radient in there with deluxe paint and anime them with another tool using one control langage… Arexx…
i’ve been told that IBM exchanged it for the Commodore Workbench, was that true ?
Djamé
Starting to love Big Blue and its open source support.
couldn’t find it on the page.
Other funny things with rex in it: “Rex Nebular”
It would be a dream come true for many of the die-hard OS/2 users myself included…
I remember using Rexx on OS/2. It is one NICE language. I also used to use Visual Rexx, which allowed you to create GUI applications in Rexx. It was awesome.
Not sure there’d really be a point (and eCS would be p*ssed), but at the very least release the Workplace Shell ? Please ?
Rexx was (and still is) very powerful scripting language on AmigaOS and related systems. If the application (and most good aplications did it) provided Arexx (A stands from Amiga;-) interface, you could manage all actions within. Imagine, you have Photoshop* and FTP client with sutch interfaces. Now, you can write script that fetch file from FTP, save it in your path, load in Photoshop*, apply some effects, shrink, and save again using FTP with different name. I should not be longer than few lines.
I hope we will have native version for Pegasos/MorphOS soon.
* Im using Photoshop as a universal name of grapphic suit, because most of OSNews readers won’t know what ArtEffect or ImageFX is.
“You know I had this on Amiga, but never got around to learning it. It seems somewhat dangerous te me now to let a script control running applications like that.”
You have been missing out on half the power of the Amiga. The great advantage of ARexx is that one script can link two or more programs together, as all good Amiga programs use the same scripting language.
You can add quite substantial features to a program, which the original programmer would never bother to code.
Some programs, such as ADPro, are more toolkits for ARexx coding than standalone programs. The GUI interface is less important than the scripting commands.
The point would be that we would have another great OS available for free (as in freedom) to use. I don’t think there is anthing wrong with hoping for that…
Sounds like DCOP for KDE applications.
Yeah, it’s something like that. But this was avalible around 1990.
Funny how you say it was quietly released, when those of us using OS/2 knew this news. Does it need to be broadcasted to every OS site to be not so quiet or something?
You should link to http://www.rexxla.org/ as it’s been known for a while they would be releasing it. Since January when they announced their discontinuance of their product line for commercial REXX dev tools, really.
I’d be happy to see REXX available on all UNIX platforms. While the various scripting languages are useful and have plenty of features, I’d be happy for the wordiness of REXX.
…would it be possible to port a open sourced worplace shell to linux? :-))
I personallt think that OS/2 as open source ounder something like the LGPL or the wxWidgets license, that would still allow programming under it for game writers and other closed source programmers would probablt win against Linux as an open OS.
Here are the reasons why.
1. Familiarity. Linux even with a GUI front end is still quite unfamiliar with most home users. particularly on those occasions.(common with ALL mixed GUI/CLI OSs inclusing Windows) where the command line has to be used. OS/2 would present them with an only sleightly different ([] around the command line before the prompt) drive letter based CLI interface from the DOS/WinConsole CLI they are used to.
2. Work Place Shell. Even people who don’t like OS/2 or think it is too old to be a practical OS any longer seem to think that the Workplace Shell was amonges the best and most Stable GUI environments created.
Add two more defunct IBM products for OS/2 (Visual Age C++ for OS/2 and Visual Age BASIC for OS/2) to the package and open source it under a proprietary software friendly OSS license (meaning NOT the GPL) and within a year I think most of the non Micro$oft talk on this board would be about OS/2 distros rather than Linux ones and Micro$oft would finally be faced with an open sopurce system that can WIN on the home desktop of most users.