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."

Comments

Glade?

[rwebb]

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.

Page won't load

[stratjakt]

Anyone have some details on this? How visual basic-like is it? Any .NET/mono integration? Cross-compilation features?

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 .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.

Someone post some details. Could Sybase+gambas be a drop-in replacement for VB6+SQL Server?

VB

[icebattle]

The thing I always liked about VB was that it enabled my boss to get his 12-year-old to write an app that almost did something useful. Then he installed it and required everyone to use it. When it failed because of poor file locking, arbitrary array limit choices (try 53) and other CS101 gambits, it became my problem (with no windows background) to fix.

Do we really need a VB clone in linuxland?

Re:VB

[stratjakt]

Yes.

You can write good code in VB, only elitist morons hear the word "BASIC" and think it's beneath them.

We have tons and tons of VB code that we have no time, or really need, to port.

High level languages are the future. People who think if it isn't written in C or ASM will be left in the past.

The easier it is to write, the easier it is to maintain, and the easier it is to use good code form and techniques. It doesn't mean any idiot can fire it up and write good code, writing good code is a skill. Just like anyone can learn to speak english, but it doesn't make them a good poet or author.

The problem is your boss's 12 year old kid, not the language. Be thankful he didn't write his dogshit code in FORTRAN, COBOL or C, using the most obscure syntax he could because it made him feel smarter. I've had to maintain/port plenty of that crap and it's no fun at all.

Re:VB

[the_weasel]

Actually, I would even go further and say the problem was his boss. I have pretty clear memories of being that 12 year old kid (18 years ago!), and writing my first software applications.

They were as good as could be expected, but no one in their right mind would have employed them in a real environment.

Congratulations to the 12 year old for doing something other than wtching tv and playing games.....

Re:What about the Visual Editor project on Eclipse

[Joe Tie.]

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.