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Gambas 1.0 Release Candidate Available
raindog2 writes "After two and a half years of development, Gambas has become the first Visual Basic-style environment for Linux to enter release candidate status. Anyone who has been frustrated by a lack of production-quality free RAD environments should give it a try."
Probably because it's been in development for two and a half years, and mono and/or dotgnu didn't exist then.
Seems quite self evident to me.
This actually looks like a very impressive and well put together program. The screenshot looks great (http://gambas.sourceforge.net/2004-09-06.png).
And according to their website "As the graphical user interface is implemented as a component, Gambas will be able to be independent of any toolkit ! You will be able to write a program, and choose the toolkit later : GTK+, Qt, etc." - so there is no toolkit bias either which is a big bonus.
Unless you count Kylix. It uses Pascal or C++ instead of Basic, but it's definitely a VB-style environment.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Seems to be the most popular thing about any new release, even though most claim to prefer a CLI.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
It looks like they already have some kind of DB integration http://gambas.sourceforge.net/2003-05-05.png
Still, I continue to think that Glade, and especially libglade, are the way to go in term of separations of UI and code.
Fabien Niñoles - Debian Maintainer
This is all good and well until you decide to make the form resizable. Then all hell breaks loose: none of the widgets move unless you explicitly change their coordinates.
It has been some time since I last used VB, but I seem to recall (Delphi definately has this) that you could "tie" components to the form so that they would grow and shrink as the form resizes. You could also specify upper and lower limits for the width and height of each component you placed on the form. I found the Delphi IDE to be far superior to anything found on the Linux front. Now, if only we could convince the Borland idiots not to annoy the developers with their mindless management style then we might have something going again.
The NetBeans IDE is also open source. It is a decent visual editor for Java Plataform development.
It is in release status. And Eclipse has lots of amazing features that makes it a serious alternative to visual studio .net.
Downside is that swt (eclipse's gui toolkit) is a bit slow on linux at the moment.
I'm surprised it got slashdotted so fast. Anyway, it compiles to its own pseudo-code not unlike the first 3 or 4 revisions of VB.... nothing saying someone couldn't write a compiler from that pseudo-code to CLR/Mono or Parrot or the JVM, but no one's really started talking about that seriously yet.
The language is about as strict as VB is when you use Option Explicit, and wasn't built as a clone of VB, so while we have a Perl script to convert form layouts over (which I wrote, and which I will integrate with the IDE when I finish my PCRE component for Gambas soon) converting code is still a manual process, and there are a lot of differences though it's still BASIC. I will continue to work on conversion tools, though.
Finally, there is no FreeTDS (Sybase/MSSQL) database driver yet, but I expect that to follow eventually.... I would be writing one myself except I keep moving people off of MSSQL and Sybase and onto MySQL.
I've only contributed a little code to Gambas, I just maintain Mandrake packages and the wiki from which the documentation is generated.
Well, in Spanish it means "shrimp", and the Gambas mascot (for every free software project must have a mascot...) is a blue cartoon shrimp. I don't know what message to take away from that, though...
Yes it was and is Free Software. However with the Open version you are required to GPL any software you compile with it. they have a dual license model, very similar to mySQL
As someone who has been monitoring the quality of software production (using our overhead satellite base station - don't bother looking for us, we cleverly painted stars on it - saved a buttload of $$$), I can tell you that it is not an oxy-moron.
After all, a certain company in Redmond has been using VB RAD tools for years...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
http://vb2py.sourceforge.net/index.htm - automagically convert VB to Python. Haven't tried it, since I haven't touched VB for years, but it could be a dream come true ;)
no taxation without representation!
From the FAQ:
"I think this line is mostly filler"
I'm surprised noone has mentioned KBasic http://www.kbasic.org/1/index.htmlyet... Also about 2 year in the making, also made by a dedicated individual.
Last week, a non-functioning preview of this Qt-based Linux/Windows IDE (later to support Mac as well) was released, unfortunately only the Windows version. Tried it at work and it looked very nice.
The main thing it has going for me is a QBasic compatibility mode. If you set VERYOLDBASIC to true, the promise is that you then have a more or less capable Qbasic emulator. The only programming I have done was in QBasic about 10 years back. I tried VB when it first came out, but all that event driven, form defining cruft got on my nerves. I'll be very happy to be able to just type 'screen 13' and have some fun again with fractals, cellular automatons and other stupid graphics hacks ( slow as hell in the time of 16Mhz 386sx but soooo much fun...)
The downer to KBasic of course is that the Bern put in SO much work that he decided to charge for it. It'll only be $30 or so, so I'll probably pony up the cash but I guess a lot of people will be p*ssed off because of this. Ah well, it's his code, he gets to decide....
HBasic http://hbasic.sourceforge.net/ also seemed nice but seems to have run in a wall sometime in the last year...
For the Basic affectionados (sans Visual), there is of course the venerable XBasic http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/ and X11-Basic http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/ tools but these are frozen in time and not really in the same league.
How about Small Basic?
It is currently active and works on Palm, Windows, and Linux. It also comes with sample programs so you can see what it can do.
http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net/
Never been frustrated. Perl's been around for a long time.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
About 20 versions ago I made an unofficial MDI version of the Gambas interface, and a new official MDI version is planned for the 1.1 series (like the old kernel numbering scheme, 1.odd will be development and 1.even will be stable.)
For what it's worth, it didn't take much coding at all (though I didn't do docking or any of that cool stuff), and I'm looking forward to using an MDI version again.
Just for posterity, here is my MDI hack. It long since stopped working with current Gambas releases due to changes in the rest of the IDE.
Xbasic has always seemed to me to be a lot closer to older BASIC dialects like Qbasic than to VB. Benoit really wanted to focus on object oriented programming (and removing a lot of the cruft that makes BASIC such a laughing stock... a quixotic pursuit since people who dislike BASIC will probably never give Gambas a try) rather than procedural stuff, if I'm not mistaken.
You laugh, but Dr. Scheme sounds like a close fit to Visual Lisp.
You neglected to follow through to the "See Also" entries. From the Control Groups page linked at the bottom
I don't think the links' text make it easy to understand that I should click on them in order to read about the MVC pattern.
(which is applicable to all classes, but no one's ever asked how to do it with anything but controls before):
Events is a foundamental construct in any programming environment: it is the basis for the MVC pattern, which is the most important pattern in developing robust applications. So events are not only about controls, but for any object that wants to act as a component.
myControl = NEW ColumnView(ME) AS "myGroup"
will then cause the handlers named myGroup_Click, et al. to receive the new columnview's events.
Sweet, but what about data objects? I want my data model as a separate entity in my program, possibly reflecting my database, for example.
Once again, questions like these really belong on gambas-user@lists.sourceforge.net
I don't think that something as foundamental as events should be 10 pages deep. It should be right in the front page.
an inability to spend more than 30 seconds reading documentation
What inability are you talking about? I don't see how 'see also' and 'control groups' have anything to do with the MVC pattern. I don't think anyone does.
does not make a language not buzzword-compatible.
Even in web development, the most effort of the last 4 years had gone into the MVC pattern. That's why Sun made J2EE model 2, that's why Cocoon is considered very good (separation of concerns), that's why there is EJBs, that's why there is Hibernate (and a myriad other MVC frameworks): to separate the data model from the view and the controllers. Not only the data model is gonna be separate from the view and controllers, but it also gonna be persistent and separate from all applications.
If you fail to see the importance of MVC, and if Gambas consequently fails to support it (which is the case, as far as I can see), then Gambas is not gonna go very far, at least for Enterprise-level apps. VB6 logic is previous decade.