Dear Michael,
Thank you very much for your kind words!
On 25.10.2025 17:51, Michael Lueck wrote:
Greetings Rony,
Rony G. Flatscher wrote:
Usually ASF distributes the sources and one is supposed to build the binaries one self. (Tried
that with xalan-c, but its CMakeLists.txt as reported was too old. Not being a CMake expert I did
not dare to dig in further after seeing that resolving issues, opened new issues thereafter, all
of which seem to be related to the newer version of CMake I am using.)
At least the XALAN package has been available to install on Xubuntu (Ubuntu) systems for quite
some time. I was thinking, from that context, to merely list it as a dependency to have installed
and available to perform builds of ooRexx. Possibly I am missing some obstacle, or possibly is
having XALAN packaged by the distro not common on other distros?
Well that is rather easy on Linux distributions, but not so on Windows. In my case I was not able to
find a Windows xalan.exe to download and run despite quite a few queries and looking up the served
links, unfortunately.
Rony G. Flatscher wrote:
Actually, I teach that to students who may just have learned programming with Java (course is
called "Business Programming" and introduces newbies and programmers alike to oo-programming with
ooRexx and BSF4ooRexx850).
Here a link to the slides that introduce among other things how one would go about employing XSLT
transformation:
<https://wi.wu.ac.at/rgf/wu/lehre/autojava/material/foils/252_AutoJava_XML_DOM_V07.pdf>: there is
an example that does a transformation of the authors of famous Rexx interpreters there ... ;)
I SOOOOO appreciate that about you, Rony!!!
When I should have been in university, then universities were teaching COBOL / FORTRAN / RPG, and
nothing else. I was eager to embrace Client/Server, not 3270 / 5250 green screen! I saw
Client/Server then, and still do, as the optimal win-win configuration.
Always there are big powerful forces trying ever to spin dependency on the host. Back then the big
iron advocates saw Client/Server as a risk to their control, "king of the hill" status.
No different today with all this nonsense push to useless disposable clients, all web-browser
based applications, all hosted applications, cloud model, subscription, etc, etc, etc....
Computers are no longer coming with CD drives, instead media / music is expected to be listened
through a streaming subscription. And on and on the madness goes.
Even Dave Plummer recently lamented in a YouTube video that his Windows Start Bar and Windows NT
Task Manager code has been completely rewritten in .Net code, and has become very bloated. Well in
a prior video of his, he was touting how coding in .Net is sooooo much safer as it has the
bureaucracy of the run-time engine to protect the code. Dave cannot have it both ways! He cannot
advocate use of .Net run-time engine, and have an exception to the Start Menu and Windows NT Task
Manager that those two things remain in native C++ code. The world really should not be working
"Rules for thee, not for me!"
I see it as nothing more than the current time manifestation of the resistance I saw back in the
1980's to big iron mainframes running COBOL / FORTRAN / RPG and green screen 3270 / 5250.
Please tell your students on my behalf how much of a special gift they are having opportunity to
learn and study under!
I cannot remember if I had encountered you earlier than 1998, or if selling 100% of my consulting
time to Consumers Energy, there the resident engineer was very fond of your CronRGF, and so
perhaps that is how I first met you. I had already long knew of Hobbes... the OS/2 software
exchange, to which you had published CronRGF. Anyway, by the time we first met in-person I was
married with three children. When you graciously provided a very impromptu tour of Vienna to my
wife and myself, we had five children. Sooooooo long out of touch of being a student in you class.
:-( Please communicate to them on my behalf what an absolute blessing and treat they have the
opportunity for, to study under your leadership and oversight. I would be VERY tempted to swap
places with one of them.
And as a P.S. the port to Windows of CronRFG (from what I recall, under 10 LOCs of changes) still
works marvelously to this day! Any Windows server I am overseeing gets CronRGF installed. :-D It
probably all goes back to CronRGF!
Ah, CronRGF, thank you for sharing this, very nice memories too!
As you know, in the OS/2 days there was Dr. Dialog on the OS/2 developer works CD which made it
brain-dead easy to create attractive and powerful OS/2 GUIs using Rexx as the programming language.
To learn about its features I used it to create an OS/2 GUI which allowed for setting, changing the
cron data via the GUI. Was really fun and helped a few people who were unacquainted with cron to
define the tasks and the recurring rules. Unfortunately, Dr. Dialog was never ported to Windows, nor
was its source code released AFAIK.
Speaking of the OS/2 days: there was one international Rexx symposium in the US, where Chip
challenged the attendees to come up with a Magic 8 ball program in their favorite Rexx. Back then
John Urbaniak was the winner using the OS/2 version of ooRexx, if I recall correctly. Back then, a
version of BSF4Rexx (the Rexx-Java bridge, forerunner of BSF4ooRexx850 which is optimized for ooRexx
5.0 and newer) was usable already, such that I tried to come up with a GUI solution exploiting
Java's awt classes on OS/2 (sic!), which did actually work. This particular version exists
*unchanged* in today's BSF4ooRexx850\samples directory and the GUI runs unchanged on Windows, macOS
and Linux. The program's birth environment was OS/2, though! 8-) It is left to the interested reader
to find that program there ... ;-)
Have a nice weekend, Michael, and please say hello to your wife and children!
Best regards
---rony
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