Saturday 30th of January 2010 already the second edition of the Syllable Winter Conference will take place in conference centre "Het Brandpunt" in Baarn. Like we did during the first Syllable summer conference with presenting Syllable Server and our WebKit based browser Webster, we will now also make some important announcements. During several presentations and demonstrations we will highlight these. We will also follow up on the content management system, with which you can manage websites on Syllable Server. In this context we will go more indepth into the TryREBOL site, with which you can try out the REBOL programming language in your browser. The recently implemented support for WebSockets on Cheyenne, part of the upcoming HTML5 web standards, with which persistent HTTP connections in an efficient manner become possible, and with that the management of rich interactive websites on Syllable Server, will of course extensively be highlighted. Keep an eye on the Syllable Winter Conference page for the latest updates to the programme.

To give you an impression of the conference, you can see here six Dutch spoken videos on YouTube of the presentations given by Kaj de Vos during the first Syllable Winter Conference in January 2009.

Part 1, deep links into the video: Syllable Desktop, memory management, swap, why do we use Linux as a server kernel?, the using of Syllable in a DVD factory.
Part 2, deep links: WebKit, mounting USB disks, terminal Bash shell, installing extra packages, Battle for Wesnoth, native applications, resource packages, VLC media player, Application Binary Interface.
Part 3, deep links: Unix System Resources, resources directory, symbolic links, no hard links, locality of packages.
Part 4, deep links: search paths, separation of system and independent packages, playing a movie with VLC.
Part 5, deep links: VLC, MediaPlayer, FFMPEG, media framework, hardware overlays, media codecs.
Part 6, deep links: the REBOL song, audio mixing.

If you want to help with making subtitles and translations of these videos please get in contact with Bas de Lange on the here mentioned email address!

WebSocket is a part of the upcoming HTML5 web standards. It allows a web browser and a web server to have a persistent, two-way full-duplex connection using just one TCP connection. It does this by starting a regular HTTP connection and then effectively renegotiating it into its more flexible underlying TCP connection. This gives it good chances to traverse firewalls, effectively giving us back the full power of the Internet. In this way, it is an evolution and replacement of Comet, which is a collection of hacks to use Ajax to simulate persistent HTTP connections. WebSocket improves over Comet by being standardised, much cleaner and more scalable. It does, however, require explicit support by both the server and the client. Currently, only Chrome 4 has WebSocket support. It is planned for Firefox and Safari. The latter means WebKit and that means we will be able to port it to Webster.

We intend to use this framework in our Syllable web infrastructure. The Cheyenne WebSocket framework is available in its SVN version. A WebSocket echo demo program is available here.

There is now a demo chat application online. Remember that you need a WebSocket browser for it, such as Chrome 4 or a nightly build of WebKit. You can follow Cheyenne discussions here.

The website is running on Syllable Server 0.3, in development towards version 0.4. For this application, the security of the server operating system was enhanced to be able to offer the public to run generic REBOL scripts.

The website was made on top of the REBOL stack included in Syllable Server. It runs on the Cheyenne web server. It is made in a Model/View/Controller architecture with the network application platform we have been working on: a combination of the QuarterMaster web framework and the content management system that is also used to build our Syllable websites. This REBOL demo site marks the transition of this application platform to being capable of building advanced interactive websites.

Our yearly summer conference will be held from Saturday July 18 to Saturday July 25 in the Netherlands. We will be sailing again on the Frisian vessel the Stêd Sleat while discussing and demoing the Syllable systems. This year we are offering several arrangements, so you can choose how many days you want to attend. There are discounts for longer stays and for kids, so you can make this into a nice vacation for your family. Contact Bas for arrangements.