I'm going to inaugurate my blog with a story I'm intensely interested in. A few months back, internet platform developer REBOL announced that they would be supplying the technology for the next version of the Morpheus p2p file-sharing application. Morpheus has been in the news alot lately, first for being cut off from their network by their technology provider-cum-competitor FastTrack. Then for hijacking a Gnutella client and releasing that as an interim platform for their users. And for deploying some annoying spyware with the gnutella client.
REBOL has been around for awhile, developing a platform that could deploy intelligent clients across a huge number of operating systems and devices. Key pieces of their language have matured, and the company has made the important leap from just supplying a new technology to actually solving a business problem with their Internet Operating System product. The details aren't terribly important, but it supplies authentication, security, application and data synchronization across a blizzard of client platforms. And while I don't have first hand experience developing in it, if it's like the rest of the REBOL platform it's extremely well designed, easy to use, but poorly documented.
REBOL can be compared to Java and Flash in that it provides an secure execution environment for mobile code - code that you download from a website for instance. It will also most likely succeed or die by the same yardstick as other mobile code platform, namely: ubiquity. In other words, can they get the REBOL runtime installed on enough platforms to achieve critical mass and become attractive to enough ISV's to sustain a software ecosystem.
Okay, that's the challenge. What strategy did REBOL come up with to surmount it?
More tomorrow.
8:40:23 PM 
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