oorexx status?

[Richard L. Hamilton]

I saw the following on Usenet comp.lang.rexx.  They mention stable 5.0 and 6.0 beta available; we're at 4.0.1_2.  The Java bridge (only for the 6.0 beta?) sounds interesting, if perhaps a complication in terms of dependencies and/or building.

Looks to me like we're at least a major version behind, or is there a reason (other than lack of maintenance) for remaining at version 4?

From: Rony <rony.flatscher at wu-wien.ac.at>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx
Subject: Re: macOS-Version of ooRexx
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 19:50:13 +0100
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On 23.03.2017 19:38, blueicafe at gmail.com wrote:
> Is there still somebody compiling a macOS version of ooRexx?
>
> If not, can somebody explain to me the procedure how to compile ooRexx from source on a Mac and
where to find the source?
>
> The last version to download is 4.12. I would like to have the most recent version 5.x.

You may want to try
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsf4oorexx/files/beta/20161026/b4r_600_500_65Bit_macosx.zip/download>.

This is a bundle of ooRexx 5.0 and the beta version of BSF4ooRexx 6.00 as of this January 2017 and
considered to be stable.

Please note that in order to install this package you must have Java installed. The reason being
that BSF4ooRexx is a bridge between Rexx and Java and therefore needs Java.

Once installed, go into the Applications folder and open the ooRexx.app, which will cause a menu to
be created that allows you to even get a GUI "rexxtry.rex". This is possible, because creating GUIs
with Java makes them available on all platforms, in this case MacOSX, but the same ooRexx-program
runs unchanged on Linux and Windows.

Via the menu you should be able to get at the ooRexx documentation. There is also documentation
about BSF4ooRexx and in the samples folder plenty of nutshell examples that demonstrate and teach
how to take advantage of Java, which is being camouflaged as the caseless and dynamically typed
ooRexx, making it easy to take full advantage of Java.

Another thing you should know for Mac platform: on the commandline (in the Terminal) you can start
Rexx programs using "rexx", both plain Rexx and Rexx programs that use Java as a huge external Rexx
function/class library. However, if you run nutshell samples that create and use GUIs from the
commandline (from the Terminal) then you must use the script "rexxj.sh" instead of "rexx".

HTH,

---rony