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REBOL Shifts the Power to the Client


By David Rubinstein
June 1, 2001 — 
Distributed computing makes the Internet more efficient.

This is the philosophy that drives REBOL Technologies and its founder, Carl Sassenrath, as the company rolls out its REBOL View, a client-side platform for distributed computing that contains the REBOL virtual machine core.

"There is a movement to distributed computing," Sassenrath said. "It got a lot of its wind from Napster, whether it's true peer-to-peer or client/server it doesn't matter." Sassenrath said the power of client computers put together far exceeds the capacity of servers, and claims Web user satisfaction can be increased dramatically by distributing the workload.

This is a vision shared by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and a team of computer scientists at MIT, who recently announced the private concern Curl Corp. and its notion of an Internet that's executable from a client machine. They also share in the belief that the Web grew because early users wishing to create a Web page could see the source code underneath the page and recreate it. The REBOL platform is open and downloadable for free atwww.rebol.com, and the applications created in REBOL are distributed as source code, as is Curl content. A $49 commercial edition, View Pro, provides encryption, external library access and shell application access to hide or protect program code.

Where the approaches to distributed computing vary, Sassenrath said, is that REBOL brings a lightweight solution to bear, as View weighs in at only 360KB. "It's not real complex," he said. "In one page of REBOL, you can get something running that's distributed. When you go to a Web site like eTrade for a quote, that quote is probably just a couple hundred kilobytes, but they send you down 3 to 4 megabytes. There's no reason to do that. It slows down response times."

REBOL View can run either as a stand-alone piece or in conjunction with REBOL Command, which provides the server side of the virtual machine and allows database access, Sassenrath said. REBOL Express brings View and Command together in a single package, with such extras as management and authentication. View runs on multiple flavors of Linux, Unix and Windows.


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