Guest Editorial: Fernando Cassia

A recent poll by the nice folks at Zexyr asked what kind of "control" for Vispro-Rexx users wanted.

The entries were the usual "led display" and "toolbar" gui elements, which would have been really nice... in 1994.

In my opinion, what OS/2 and Rexx needs (now more than ever) is an easy way to create a new wave of "Internet aware" applications, in native code, for those who don't want to take the steep learning curve to Java, or those that simply prefer the performance of native PM code.

Here's what I told them, about what Vispro-Rexx needs:

This is needed to ease the creation of web-enabled apps, and to overcome the complexity of dealing with low-level protocol programming through rxsocks on every single application, "re-inventing the wheel" every time. The way I see it, it would work like this:

http_get("url") example: file= http_get("www.someserver.com/file.htm")

Imagine the flexibility of grabbing some information from the web, with a single line of code, parsing it, and doing whatever you want with the data. Currently you can't do this. (You can always dig the net looking for advice, and steal some source code from other programs, but the fact is that there is no http-get support built into rexx).

HTTP_post is even more important, as it would allow the creation of GUI front end apps that query web servers, auto-filling web forms, and retrieving the resulting page from the POST opperation. Imagine logging into a password protected page, retrieving data from the web server, then parsing and processing its output and send back data to another web server. Or, querying several different web sites, filtering, andcombining data

I think this would work like this:

http_post(url, var1, value1, var2, value2, etc)

example:

result = http_post("login.someweb.com/login.cgi","USERNAME","fcassia","PASSWD","blahblah)

On both, the result could be loaded on a var as a big string, saved on a rexx stream, written out to a tempfile for processing, etc.

The possibilities are endless.

Number Two: URL renderer (MOZILLA integration into Visual Rexx)

This is THE issue. It would make a LOT of difference.

If you have seen the latest Napster Beta7 for win32, or napigator, or several other win32 apps that open web content as part of its windows, you'll know what I mean. They often use the IE API and ActiveX control to display web pages (often advertising banners, others some information pages from a web server, etc).

The way I see it, the gecko OS/2 engine is complete and working... the only thing needed is a vp-rexx control that calls the gecko engine and allows gecko to render HTML content inside the application's GUI.

Of course such HTML would lack any interectivity, but imagine the possibilities! SUCH A CONTROL WOULD EVEN MAKE THE IDEA OF A GIF/JPG display control obsolete. Why? Because the gecko engine in mozilla already knows how to handle not only jpg and gif, but PNG as well!. You would only have to give it an url in the form:

file:///C|/app/subdir/somefile.gif instead of the normal "http://" url.

It would serve as a dual purpose control: local and REMOTE image display, and WEB (html) display. (the Mozilla engine really doesn't care if content is local or remote,a single jpg or html which references jpg files).

Now think about this for a minute... a whole new generation of OS/2 "web aware" applications could be developed IN MINUTES. Checking servers... updating data on password-protected internet sites. Querying and combining various web info to produce reports.

Number Three: Web-Enabling the WPS

Take the previous idea, but instead on calling Mozilla's Gecko (HTML rendering) engine, imagine a web page ON A FOLDER. And since the desktop is a folder, you could have a web page as the desktop background, if you wanted too. (This is MSFT's vision, but with a PULL model instead of the failed "PUSH" nonsense)

The guys at Stardock have already showed us the power of SOM (yes, I know, for this we'd have to use IBM's VA C++ 3.x). It would be quite easy to create, for instance, a folder subclass that renders an URL as its background. Or the plain text contents of an html file on some web server as a _SCROLLING MESSAGE_ on a window's titlebar. Again, the possibilities are endless.

I hope the folks at Zexyr take ideas #1 and #2 into consideration. Now that Watcom decided to open-source their C/C++ compiler, including its OS/2 support, I can only hope that they extend that decision to the powerful (remember it used to sell for about $150 until its demise) VX-Rexx IDE. Just imagine a VX-Rexx ported to Win32, Linux, and OS/2, and being able to cover all 3 platforms from the same rexx source code.

About the last idea... I don't know who will do it, but I do think it would be in everybody's interest to at least attempt it.

The folks at Sun used to say "The Network is the Computer" ... and if you have read my previous articles you know where the phrase "It's the economy, stupid!" comes from. Well, I'd combine both, as the following mantra:

"It's about web-enabling everything, baby!"

What do you think?