Welcome to the Rexx Language Association website

The Rexx Language Association (RexxLA) is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use and understanding of the Rexx programming language. RexxLA manages several open source implementations of the Rexx language, two of those are previous commercial offerings from IBM. Both Open Object Rexx and NetRexx are professionally crafted language implementations that come with abundant documentation. For more information about RexxLA and to learn how to join, visit our About RexxLA page.

The 2011 Rexx Language Symposium was held December 4-7 2011, on the island of Aruba, situated in the Dutch West Indies, at the Divi Village Golf & Beach Resort. The proceedings will be online shortly.

2011-08-28: NetRexx 3.01 planned availability September 5th, 2011

On September 5th, or slightly thereafter (depending on the outcome of our strict testing process), NetRexx 3.01 will be available via NetRexx.org. This release is the first with original contributions from the RexxLA development team; it will have new documentation donated by Mike Cowlishaw, an updated User Guide and several small enhancements and fixes. Update: A Release Candidate is now available for download, testing and feedback.

2011-08-22: BSF4ooRexx Generally Available

We are pleased to announce the availability of BSF4ooRexx, one of the RexxLA managed open source projects, today, August 22nd, 2011. After an extensive test period the development team is proud to announce the general availability (GA) of BSF4ooRexx, version 4.06, 20110822.

BSF4ooRexx is a language binding for the easy to learn and powerful scripting language ooRexx, which allows ooRexx programmers to directly use the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on practically every computer. The language binding camouflages Java as a dynamically typed, caseless language, making it extremely easy to exploit Java by non-Java programmers. The project is to be found at its SourceForge page.

2011-06-08: NetRexx Open Source

I am very happy to be able to announce that today, the 8th of June 2011 (World IPv6 Day) IBM has sent RexxLA the source code of the reference implementation of the NetRexx translator for administration and release under the ICU open source license. I would like to thank IBM, and everyone at IBM and RexxLA who has put in hard work to make this possible. This has secured the future of NetRexx, our favourite computer language, and enables us to do work on it to keep it up to date whenever this seems necessary. A special thanks to Mike Cowlishaw is in order, who not only invented and produced the language, but also was of invaluable assistance during the open source process.

This brings an end to a long period in which some have expressed doubts regarding the perspective of the language and the intentions of the parties involved. Now that we have this behind us, the real work can start. The language board will convene and draw up plans for the future. Because a lot of the work of readying the source code for publication has been done over the years past, there will be no long delay in having it available in a source code repository on the net. The www.netrexx.org site will be on the air shortly.

The IBM NetRexx web site will be changed to reflect this new status of NetRexx, and will cease to function later this year. The binary distribution will be available from www.netrexx.org initially and will reflect NetRexx 3.00, which is an almost unchanged release that contains the required source code modifications of the translator and has some small fragments of code adapted to be able to build on more recent Java versions. It is expected that 3.01 will be available from the code repository and will be the first official RexxLA release.

René Vincent Jansen
President, Rexx Language Association.