Open Object Rexx Project Status
October - 2004

This is the project's first status report so a little introduction seems in order. Here is the current project team membership.

David Ashley
Rony Flatscher
Mark Hessling
Rick Mc Guire
Pam Taylor

Currently our duties overlap but we will be attempting to refine the leadership roles over the next month. We are all current members of the Rexx Language Association and all have an extensive background with the Rexx language. Rick is one of the original authors of Object Rexx and knows the most about the code base. David and Mark both have open source backgrounds and Mark is the current maintainer of Regina Rexx. Rony has extensive experience with Object Rexx and Pam is attempting to coordinate all of our efforts (its a rough job trying to keep a bunch of maverick's from going wild).

Once we have finished the initial setup work we will be able to welcome all of you who are so eager to to contribute to this project. Many things still need to be done including adopting a project charter, assign roles, and organizing the project.

IBM and RexxLA have agreed on a joint announcement concerning the Open Sourcing of Object Rexx, which will be published on the RexxLA site, once the publishing date within IBM is fixed. This way the announcement will be jointly published, so please stay tuned and check back with http://www.RexxLA.org/

Now the good news. We have received a LOT of material from IBM and we expect to receive even more. Here is the list of things we have received, expect to receive, and some things we will not ever get.

Items received from IBM

  1. Complete source code for the Object Rexx interpreter for Windows, Linux, AIX and Solaris. There is some code included in this for OS/2 but there is no build procedure and we are uncertain whether the code is complete enough to actually build an OS/2 interpreter.
  2. Source code for the external function libraries rexxutil, rxsock, oodialog, rxmath and some smaller libraries.
  3. Documentation in PDF and HTML format.

Items not yet received from IBM

  1. The Windows development environment. We will probably never get this due to some legal issues with the development libraries used to create this application.
  2. Documentation source code. Although the source for the documentation is in an SGML format it will need to be translated to a different SGML/XML format. We will require some help with this so if you have any XML/SGML/DocBook experience please drop us a note.
  3. Rxftp external function library. There is a legal problem with this library because IBM used code that is under a non-disclosure agreement. We are considering replacing this library with an OORexx class that uses the RxSocks external function library.

There are still a lot of legal issues to overcome before the code can be put in the SourceForge CVS repository. All theses issues will take some time to resolve so your patience will be appreciated. Again, please check back with http://www.RexxLA.org/ or subscribe to the list oorexx-announce to receive development updates and news like this.

Submitted by
W. David Ashley and the Open Object Rexx Project Team