New Awakening, Thanks To OORexx

Objects!

In the past several months, I stopped posting much here. In part, it is because of my employment schedule. And in part, it is because many of the things I wanted to do with REXX required platform-specific calls to the system shell. If you are interested in doing things more or less cross-platform, this is a major killer. Additionally, there is no variety of Rexx on the acceptable software list for my employer, so I have little opportunity to do anything practical with it.

On my main "road dog" laptop, which now runs Ubuntu Linux, Regina Rexx was installed from the Ubuntu repositories. I have since removed it and installed Open Object Rexx. My intention is to utilize only OORexx (and possibly NetRexx, even though it appears to be abandoned) from here on out, because of additional functionality built into the language that is not found in Regina or other standard Rexx interpreters. I want to emphasize that it is not an indictment of Regina or other standard Rexx interpreters, but merely a reflection of my desire for WORA cross-platform scripts.

One place where some version of Rexx might be useful is as a drop-in replacement for the somewhat ambiguously named KiXtart, a scripting language for Windows. However, most of my use of KiX is in automating software installation & configuration. KiX has support for editing the Windows registry, and is also a small, movable executable. For example, I might use KiX on a CD of software updates, as a kind of batch script on steroids. I am not yet seeing a case for building such a CD with Rexx instead, even if it was allowable in my workplace.

One area where I have some amount of interest is file format transformations. In the workplace, it is common for one person to send data in MSOffice 2007 formats, while most others use MSOffice 2003 formats, and some use OpenDocument Format(ODF) or WordPerfect Office format. Occasionally, I even run into data in MSWorks format. There are also JPEG, GIF, PNG, SVG, and other image/graphics formats that one might want to transform between. There is little likelihood of my writing a full-featured transformation engine, whether in Rexx or in <insert shiny new language here>, but I do hope to do some minor transformations and to demonstrate them for others who are (like me) just starting on their Rexx journey.

This change has been a long time coming, but it was inspired by a situation I faced two years ago and again last year. A number of people that I dealt with had a common situation: they had a fairly large number of photographs taken over a period of several days that were dumped into their "My Pictures" folder. Inside that folder, they needed to find photos for particular dates or locations in order to associate those photos with content (reports, articles) they were writing. I found it particularly difficult even to find out how to obtain that information in Rexx, while I found it within the same day once I started researching how to accomplish the task in KiX. The biggest issue with KiX was that the solution as implemented was Windows-specific, and some of the need came from Linux users.

Actually, I installed and configured DigiKam for my Linux users, so that photo uploads are automatically placed in date-coded directories. Every couple of months, I manually move these into a ~/year/month hierarchy. (I am planning to write a script to do it and use cron to run it monthly.)

Anyway, consider this a rebirth of interest in this blog and its subject matter. One of my interests is finding ways to use Rexx to automate repetitive tasks in a small business environment, alongside Python, Ruby, REBOL, and so on. The docs are becoming my friends. Also recommended: The Rexx Language (TRL).

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