Fwd: Re: [RexxLA] 24th International Rexx Language Symposium Impressions

[ThSITC]

Rene & all there at ibm-netrexx,

What shall You think to make the same or similar syntax and semantics available in ibm-netrexx?

Kind greetings from Vienna,
Thomas.
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Betreff:	Re: [RexxLA] 24th International Rexx Language Symposium Impressions
Datum:	Thu, 16 May 2013 05:49:55 +0100
Von:	Sahananda (Jon) Wolfers [hidden email]
Antwort an:	RexxLA Members mailing list [hidden email]
An:	RexxLA Members mailing list [hidden email]

Following on from Frank's presentation I have made a tentative request for an ::Asset directive in ooRexx.

If this interests you, you can read about it, make suggestions, vote it up (or down)  or even volunteer to implement it at https://sourceforge.net/p/oorexx/feature-requests/545/

Jon

On 9 May 2013 17:45, René Jansen <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear RexxLA members,

as I sit and write this, the 24th International Rexx Symposium is behind us; North Carolina has sunshine and blue skies and it is getting warm - this is very considerate of the weather, that was bad with rainstorms and general grayness when we were sitting inside of the conference room. The Comfort Suites have provided us with a nice conference room (with a size perfectly attuned to the number of participants), and generally excellent facilities, for this symposium, and we were very happy to stay here one more time.

In the past three days we had the opportunity to listen to some interesting presentations, all of which have their materials online at this moment, at http://www.rexxla.org/events/2013/schedule.html for all to read.

The symposium started off with an interesting presentation on embedding assets in Rexx code by Frank Clarke. In this presentation Frank shows how, instead of using several libraries to have panels, skeletons and other resources available, it is feasible - and has many advantages - to embed them into the Rexx source, from where they can be accessed using the sourceline directive and some clever libdef's. With lot of the attendants having a mainframe background, there was great interest in this approach. It is the policy of RexxLA to give all Rexx implementations an equal share of attention, and this presentation made good on that promise right away.

Next up was Les Koehler, who, having the distinction of being one of the first Rexx users outside of the lab, taught us how to do defensive programming, here defined as the ability to preserve run time data so that problem determination in case of program failure is straight forward. In this case, the environment is Windows and The Hessling Editor, also known as THE, an editor that was inspired on and looks and behaves just like XEDIT on VM.
In his presentation, Les showed off some nifty ooRexx double-twiddle stuff. The overall lesson is that logging is a mandatory part of every application that is to be taken seriously.

After this René Jansen did his talk about NetRexx server pages. Because the http://www.netrexx.org website needed an overhaul, an attempt was made to have a no-configuration J2EE web container, running the active content on NetRexx pages. It was shown how this content (among which, the QTIME program, but also the download, build, documentation and example pages) is implemented, showing most of the source code, and the tagged html pages.

Gil Barmwater did a presentation that made a lot of ooRexx users happy: Installing and Managing multiple ooRexx versions. The realities of libraries and bitness sometimes force multiple installations; also, Gil provided us a straightforward way to test out a new version without destroying the previous working version. The batch file for the Windows environment is attached to the symposium proceedings, and is ready to be used on your system. Gil did us the favor to make his presentation a workshop: during the presentation he has shown us what to do - and that it works!

The first day was concluded with Prof. Dr. Rony Flatscher's book presentation. It has been some years after the latest comprehensive Rexx book - but this very thorough work by our Austrian professor is what a lot of people have been waiting for. It is the perfect companion for the person who has done some programming in other languages, has felt the frustration of having to deal with them, and is ready to switch to a human oriented language that does everything much neater and faster. Along the way he presented a tutorial (originally planned for Sunday evening) on how to move from Classic to Object Rexx.

Tuesday started with three very worthwhile sessions by the same Prof. Flatscher. We all know the problem of visiting an education event and then not being able to try out the acquired knowledge in our work. With these three presentations however, how to use SAX(1), DOM(2) with ooRexx on XML, and how to make portable userinterfaces using ooRexx and BSF4ooRexx, one can just start, XML and GUI being so ubiquitous in our present day.

Virgil Hein from IBM led a session in which those present could speak to the IBM Rexx Interpreter team. The current roster of work for the Rexx interpreter was discussed, and we saw that there is active work going on to satisfy customer requirements and fix reported issues, for example in the handling of PDS/E and empty non-SMS datasets in dd concatenations.

Marc Vincent Irvin surprised us with a very dynamic presentation with subjects like how to produced web interfaces in an ISPF way (with interesting parallells to Frank's presentation on embedding resources), and taking off to subjects like AI and introducing his new project 'SpaceBooks' to the audience. Marc is a veteran Rexx user and has attended Rexx Symposia going back as long as Asilomar in 1991.

Tuesday at the symposium ended with the RexxLA board meeting, at which Frank Clarke was introduced as a new RexxLA board member, and the ARB structure for the Rexx group of languages was discussed.

Wednesday was the last (half) symposium day, and it started with a spectacular presentation from Marc Hessling, from Brisbane, Australia, in which he has explained how he used Rexx (Regina in this case) on a Raspberry Pi computer to be able to remotely open his garage doors. For added excitement, we were able to open and close his doors from the Durham, NC conference room. He has used a JQuery mobile web interface and a Rexx web server. We were able to see the doors moving over a FaceTime call, right on the screen.

René Jansen showed us his progress with using NetRexx on the Raspberry Pi to to embedded work in interfacing with electronic component hardware like sensors and relays, and was able to demonstrate the hardware doing these things, controlled by NetRexx programs, some of which using a JNI interface to lower level SPI interface drivers.

The final presentation was reserved for the father of Rexx, Mike Cowlishaw, who presented from his UK home. He was kind enough to show us his personal bag of tricks which he has put together over the years, and he took the time to explain the structure and workings.

So another International Rexx Language symposium has come to an end. It was a joyful experience, like always, it was good to meet old friends, and meet new people in the business that also use the Rexx language. Also, North Carolina continued to be a very hospitable environment with excellent food in the local restaurants. Next year's symposium planning will start, we are looking at the first week of May (or even end of Arile 2014), with Austin, Texas as the prime candidate. Please mark your agenda's (in pencil), so you also can be part of it, and meet the hardcore of Rexx.


best regards,

René Jansen.

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