Other Software > Developer's Corner

NetRexx is now free and open source courtesy of IBM

(1/3) > >>

40hz:
Good news for Rexx fans. It's been open sourced and released under IBM's ICU License.


NEWS: NetRexx Open Source

I am very happy to be able to announce that today, the 8th of June 2011 (World IPv6 Day) IBM has sent RexxLA the source code of the reference implementation of the NetRexx translator for administration and release under the ICU open source license. I would like to thank IBM, and everyone at IBM and RexxLA who has put in hard work to make this possible. This has secured the future of NetRexx, our favourite computer language, and enables us to do work on it to keep it up to date whenever this seems necessary. A special thanks to Mike Cowlishaw is in order, who not only invented and produced the language, but also was of invaluable assistance during the open source process.

This brings an end to a long period in which some have expressed doubts regarding the perspective of the language and the intentions of the parties involved. Now that we have this behind us, the real work can start. The language board will convene and draw up plans for the future. Because a lot of the work of readying the source code for publication has been done over the years past, there will be no long delay in having it available in a source code repository on the net. The www.netrexx.org site will be on the air shortly.

The IBM NetRexx web site will be changed to reflect this new status of NetRexx, and will cease to function later this year. The binary distribution will be available from www.netrexx.org initially and will reflect NetRexx 3.00, which is an almost unchanged release that contains the required source code modifications of the translator and has some small fragments of code adapted to be able to build on more recent Java versions. It is expected that 3.01 will be available from the code repository and will be the first official RexxLA release.

best regards,

René Vincent Jansen
President, Rexx Language Association.
--- End quote ---

Link to announcement here.

Not familiar with Rexx? You can read about it here.

Rexx for everyone

Scripting with Free Software Rexx implementations

David Mertz ([email protected]), Developer, Gnosis Software, Inc.

David Mertz is owner and chief consultant for Gnosis Software, Inc. whose corporate slogan is "We Know Stuff!" (and we do). His fondness for IBM dates back embarrassingly many decades. You can reach David at [email protected]; you can investigate all aspects of his life at his personal Web page. Suggestions and recommendations on past or future articles are welcome. Check out his book, Text Processing in Python.

Summary:  It's easy to get lost in the world of "little languages" -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages. Many Linux programmers and systems administrators would benefit from adding a Rexx implementation to their collection of go-to tools.
--- End quote ---

wraith808:
Blast from the past.  I haven't kept up with Rexx since my OS/2 days...

cranioscopical:
I use the-now-open-source ooRexx for all kinds of odds and ends.
In Amiga days ("Multi-tasking? Who needs multi-tasking? You can't do two things at once!" they said) I liked the way Bill Hawes's ARexx hung around and acted like a traffic cop.

Renegade:
Is the MS version T-Rexx?

40hz:
Blast from the past.  I haven't kept up with Rexx since my OS/2 days...
-wraith808 (June 13, 2011, 02:22 PM)
--- End quote ---

Makes two of us. And I forgot how useful a tool Rexx was in the process. ;D

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page