Sunday, April 08, 2007

ooRexx 3.1.2



Another year, another Rexx release. Busy with the preparations for 2 (two) presentations at the annual Rexx Language Association Symposium, this year in Tampa, Florida ( http://www.rexxla.org ).

The Mac builds of Open Object Rexx 3.1.2 are going smoothly, as is the testing, and the only lingering problem is that BSF4Rexx fails in an obscure way. Yesterday I added the -e switch to startup the interpreter with a command line script, this was needed in order to integrate ooRexx with the Automator application that is standard on MacOSX Tiger.

I also was experimenting with bridging Applescripts to ooRexx, and had some fun with the Skype API. Finally I can know who are my Friends with a simple API call.

The Automator is a very funny program, allowing you to piece together a workflow (of things to automate) using prefab blocks of functionality with pipes and filters, passing data either through stdin or using command line arguments. Very much like a space age version of VM Pipelines. Polishing in between stages can be done using scripts (be it shell, perl, php, python or ruby - and since yesterday also ooRexx). This is not yet in the release version, but if you really cannot wait, contact me with the react button.