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Gambas 1.0 Release Candidate Available

Posted by Hemos on from the getting-ready-for-the-big-time dept.

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."

8 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No mono or dotgnu? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Wow by linux_warp · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Wow by raindog2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      In fact, someone is working on it already:

      http://wiki.gnulinex.org/gambas/6

      Scroll to the bottom (and use Babelfish or Google if you don't know enough Spanish.)

      Daniel has already written three Gambas components (sockets, compression, and most recently XML) so I have every reason to believe he's serious about the Gtk one. I have seen posts by him on mail.gnome.org asking for help on this issue or that, so he is apparently well into coding it.

      Also, you certainly can compile, install and run Gambas without Qt... you just can't write graphical programs or use the IDE without it (yet!) For example, while I wouldn't really recommend it given the existence of php, modperl, j2ee et al., you can write CGI programs using Gambas.

  3. Kylix by tverbeek · · Score: 3, Informative
    Gambas has become the first Visual Basic-style environment for Linux to enter release candidate status.

    Unless you count Kylix. It uses Pascal or C++ instead of Basic, but it's definitely a VB-style environment.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  4. Re:VB-style GUI design by sapped · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Page won't load by raindog2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:VB-style GUI design by kraut · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  7. Re:Basic on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    While you're at it, what about wxBasic? It's free, open source, uses the excellent wxWidgets library.