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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."
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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