* Problem 1: all my major documents (including the Rexx and NetRexx books, and many on decimal arithmetic) are marked up with GML    (Generalized Markup Language) a precursor to SGML and HTML.   The only production-quality formatter for this is IBM's DCF product, which runs on a mainframe, but I really needed to be able to format documents offline, and RexxLA needs the NetRexx documents in LaTex or other formats.  Solution: write a GML to OpenOffice converter.  This was not as simple as expected -- but Rexx was the   ideal language for the job.

 * Problem 2: how to process 16 GB of unfiltered plain-text meteorological data to extract historical weather patterns for publication on the web?  Another, very different, job for Rexx ...

This talk will describe how the converter and analyser work, demonstrate their use, and show their results.

With the advent of ooRexx 4.0 there are many new welcomed features that BSF4Rexx can take advantage of, one very important area being the new ability to call back from C++ into a running instance of the Rexx interpreter, which eventually will allow BSF4Rexx to realize call backs from Java using C++ to bridge to ooRexx.

This presentation will introduce the BSF4Rexx architecture, give examples of ooRexx interacting with Java and Java deploying ooRexx scripts, and discusses new planned improvements and features, which ooRexx 4.0 will allow for.

This presentation introduces a set of useful public routines and public classes that are designed to ease manipulating strings. All string related BIFs (built-in-functions) are enhanced such, that it becomes possible to carry out operations in caseless mode (by default) that are otherwise case-dependent, like ABBREV(...), CHANGESTR(...), COMPARE(), COUNTSTR(...), LASTPOS(...), POS(...) or WORDPOS(...). In addition negative position and length parameters become possible, which may be known from other programming languages, e.g. WORD2(string,-2) will extract the second to last word from the given string, SUBWORD2(string,-1,-2) the last two words from the given string.

In addition the class "StringOfWords" allows for defining words assembled from non-English characters (like German umlauts), offering all of the word-BIF related functionality in form of respective methods, that also allow for negative position and length values.

Finally, this utility package defines a few comparison classes for sorting and supplies a public routine that eases its usages for sorting for the Rexx programmer.

The package works for ooRexx 3.2 and was tested under the alpha version of ooRexx 4.0.