RebTalk Forum testing begins

As I've mentioned, we've wanted to build a native R3 reblet for testing. Doing so forces us to make R3 usable and motivates us to fix bugs.

Over the weekend, I built RebTalk Forum in R3. It is a small threaded forum communication program that I hope to eventually use for open developer discussions (and they will be mirrored on the web.) Currently, it includes user account creation/login, topics, threads, and messages. It also has a bit of user priv management, so we can control who gets to do what.

Remember, it's not the feature set as much as it is the fact it runs in 3.0. So please don't compare this little R3 reblet to a commercial BBS. But, it's actually quite usable for such a tiny system.

Here is a RebTalk 0.0.1 screenshot, rendered in the default developer GUI skin:

I put the server online yesterday, and we are testing the client. It seems to work, however, a few developers are seeing some HTTP or TCP problems, which we still need to solve.

And, here are a few stats to help judge R3 complexity for a small reblet like RebTalk:

RebTalk client: 8.3 KB or 2.3 KB mold-load compressed
RebTalk server: 4.6 KB or 1.2 KB mold-load compressed

Writing RebTalk was a great exercise in 3.0 development. For one, it helped me to tune the submit reactor (end user face action), making really clean CUG code sections possible.

Here's an example of a popup window that asks for new topic name and submits it:

view [
    title "Start new topic:"
    field
    embed [copy rt-state]
    group [
        button "Submit" submit send-app 'topic
        button "Cancel" close
    ]
]

Once we get it stable, we'll add more users, release the source, and see where it goes from there. And certainly, the GUI needs more improvements. But, we're getting there.

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