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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."
Those are languages, this is a language + rad environment.
Just out of curiosity, what are these rad environments for these languages?
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
I never thought I'd see "Visual Basic" and "production level RAD tool" in the same summary.
Best FPS gaming site on the net... ok, well maybe not the best
What about the Glade toolkit? Granted, it's not "Visual Basic" but it does help take care of the donkey work in getting the user interface setup.
Trusted by cats.
Anyone have some details on this? How visual basic-like is it? Any .NET/mono integration? Cross-compilation features?
.NET yet. By we I mean me since I have no real help here. Fuck it, I haven't even had time to replace all the old RDO code in a lot of the crap.
Something for linux that's close enough to VB to make porting effortless would be a dream come true, and our company could move away from MSFT. Of course, some customers will always wan't VB clients and SQL Server backends, because they're asshats.
The free edition of Sybase for linux perked eyebrows among the PHB's around here, and I was actually give time to set a box up to prove that it could, indeed be a drop in replacement for a SQL Server backend, and I impressed them somewhat showing how much easier it would be to maintain over a crappy dial-up connection..
Now it's all these bazillion client apps I want rid of. We're looking hard at mono and C# for new development, but we have oodles of legacy VB6 code to maintain, and nowhere near the manpower to port all of it. Hell, we don't even have time to port it to
Someone post some details. Could Sybase+gambas be a drop-in replacement for VB6+SQL Server?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And the vast numbers of people that have been able to throw a few things together to make their lives immeasurably easier shouldn't have been able to?
Nobody is saying that people should be constructing enterprise tools with no experience - VB is typically used as a nice interface for some data/processes that would otherwise be a nightmare to bring together, or require actual CS people.
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Any tool can do this.
An election gives idiots the power the choose their government.
The internet gives idiots the ability to broadcast their views.
Most tools can be used in either good or bad ways. In a free society I wouldn't argue for the arbitrary restriction of a tool that has a negligible downside.
Do we really need a VB clone in linuxland?
Is it just me or is nobody noticing here that the only thing this gambas thing does that no other IDE (like kdevelop) hasn't yet is offer a basic-like language? I mean seriously, other than the basic thing what does this thing do that's so new?
I'd rather not have basic available to learn to program in. It makes it too easy to avoid learning proper programming practices, and it damaged my ability to code for a long time.
I'm not sure if that warning is quite appropriate in this context. The main reason being that eclipse/swt are able to be used with gcj. If one were to follow the authors advice at the end of your article, and only have a free implementation of java on his system, the 'Java trap' should be impossible to fall into.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Free in the sense of money is not important.
You could always have a "trial" copy, and start to pay, once you have actual work.
Free in the sense of freedom is more relevant. Other important issues arise. For example, a free tool is more useful with source code, because it can be in many cases a huge functional example of your development domain, such as Eclipse, or Tomcat have been for me.
Free as in freedom is important for people that care about freedom, too. I happen to be one of them.
So, no, Kylix doesn't count, it doesn't make much of a difference with Visual Basic, it is virtually equally free.
VB 4 was the pinacle of the MS RAD environment design. after that they went with the locked window no overlap style with no desktop space.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I am a VB developer (legacy support). While, that is a fairly major problem, that is NOT the critical stop gap for this product. This is amazing, because they have complete control over the code. If it is a problem, I'm sure you could write a bug up and submit it...It will most likely be fixed. This would NEVER be possible with the real VB.
On the other hand this might be a fantastic opportunity for Linux and even Open Source. VB has always been an extremely easy language to learn and utilize. Simply hobbyist like to write it in to create fast/quick programs for their own means. Now there is really no excuse to not start writing for Linux.
VB, while it is an extreme pain to support, when/if developers do not utilize some of the best practices, it can be an extremely quick and easy prototyping tool.
While many/most would argue that VB should not be used in a development environment, most do not have the pleasure of telling the boss: "Yes, we're going to re-write all of our legacy code in Y language". If it ain't broke, don't fix it attitude + "Time is Money" is a huge factor in development (thus, my incredibly long post on Slashdot).
I for one am thrilled that something like this has been released on Linux. I am definetly going to give it a try. Rock on Gambas!
Sig it.
The source code is available. You can do this yourself. When you're done, you'll be the "someone experienced" and will have exactly what you need to boot!
Visual Basic, until version 6, had a very horrible architecture: business logic was embedded in forms. VB6 does not follow the MVC pattern, and it does not have the proper constructs to implement that manually.
Furthermore, in a world that has Java + Eclipse, Qt + Qt Designer/KDeveloper, why should I use VB6? it maybe easier in the beginning, but in the long run, it is a nightmare, especially for big distributed projects.
I think Gambas is about 5 years late, to say the least.
If they want to dominate the market, they must make it CROSS-PLATFORM.
So far I haven't seen any cross-platform RAD tool. Except Delphi/Kylix, rest in peace.