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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."
Kinda curious why they don't base it on mono and/or dotgnu but have their own interpreter.
Kylix doesn't count? Although the *free* version did have some limitations it was quite possible to develop software in a RAD based environment using Kylix.
Granted, neither version (free or pay) took off quite the way some would have liked but all the same, let's give credit where credit is due.
Wow this project has matured fast. I stumbled on it ??a year and a half ago?? when it was still in its infancy. Every once in a while I visit it, expecting it to be dead like so many other projects that I try to follow, but I am always suprised by new material on the front pages.
Congrats to the Gambas developers for being such work horses! I am impressed.
Put identity in the browser.
...is that someone experienced now does the right thing; that is: Slap a database engine onto Gambas, put everything including documentation, examples of sample code for particular problems, PDF creation on the fly using available tools and all dependencies required into ONE application or file. Various components to be installed can be selected at installation time. Then announce that they have M$ Access killer called GambasDB. I will then immediately jump onto the band wagon. I wonder why it has not happened before.
So, the ability to script KDE from bash was a bad idea, too?
Put identity in the browser.
Maybe the Visual Editor isn't in release status? (I think it is, but I'm not sure.) But this definately isn't the only nor the first visual editor project. Check it out if you're interested in a RAD platform with graphical elements very similar to Visual Basic, etc. It uses Java and not BASIC, but I don't see that as a bad thing.
Oh yeah... it's also open source.
The Eclipse Visual Editor Project
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
Unfortunately, this IDE seems to suffer from the same horrible method of GUI design as VB (judging from the screenshot), whereby one draws components on a form, thus specifying the widgets' absolute coordinates. 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. I was forced to write my own geometry manager, in VB, to overcome this problem in a clean way.
Otherwise, this looks like a very good product for a company looking to switch to Unix, but wanting to retain compatibility with all their VB scripts (like the one I work at). Of course, porting the scripts to a better language (*cough*Python*cough*) would be the best solution, but management just won't hear of it :/.
component based development was the important reason for VB's survival. Before we get onto the robustness jokes, is there a plan to implement something similar ? I did RTFA but the site is crawling under /. attack currently.
I can't read the articles due to slashdotting, but I was wondering, does anyone know if there are plans for a Windows version? I know this is intended to bring RAD design to Linux, but I think a lot of Windows users would be attracted to a free, open source alternative to Visual Basic, particularly considering how expensive .Net tools can be.
The word "BASIC" scares elitist morons who think all "good" code is obscure unreadable bullshit with one letter variable names (all defined globally, of course), no real error detection, and has to be able to compile with "gcc -Funrolloops -O3 -megaoptimizeformyathlon" or else its crappy.
High level languages are the future, the closer to spoken language the better.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Beat that.
For python, one of my favorites has always been Boa. It's starting to show it's age in Linux though, using a version of WxWidgets best compiled to use gtk1.
Everything will be taken away from you.
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Like it or not people, windows took off and allowed more programmers into Windows because of VB. Of course version 1 of VB sucked BIG TIME, but more and more apps were created and allowed new developers to move from DOS to windows. Linux does need a VB type of application, not saying it has to be a clone of it, but something that would allow the end user to create a app in a few minutes and not days.
Other languages should be scared.
VB and Windows are popular because they are easy and quick.
If I could use this to easily write/compile (for free), software tha tran on Linux, Windows, and Mac...
guess who would unleash a new programing era?
The key here is cross platform. Like RealBasic, but free.
Mozilla Firefox built a lot off of that.
Organizations love standardization. Netscape offered that. Now Mozilla Offers that. But VB keeps them in windows.
remove VB...
and Linux has disarmed another problem attempting to kill it.
Of course, Gambas is not VB6. Forms and the classes containing their business logic are separate, though you can have the IDE hide that fact from the user.
I would also say that anyone currently using C++ and thinking "hey, this is easy enough" is really not the target audience for any kind of BASIC RAD environment. I have to admit that I wish there were something like Gambas only with Perl (and no, Qt Designer and PerlQt don't count... I am the author of one of the more prominent PerlQt projects out there and I quickly reached a point where I had to resort to emacs.)
The existence of MSVC++ never eclipsed VB's popularity, and I see no reason that the glut of C++, Java and even Python environments for Linux should make Gambas unnecessary. It's meant for people who are not doing GUI programming for Linux currently or who find it to be annoyingly arcane, not for people who have "#include" burned into their fingers' muscle memory.
Uh... we've had a GUI builder which is tons better than glade for the last two years. :)
I should know.. I wrote it.
http://www.gnustep.org
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
But how am I gonna write apps based on the MVC pattern with Gambas? I saw no support for class events, for example. Or the ability to define my own callbacks in classes. In fact, it is only the forms that have callbacks.
I think that any non-MVC GUI app quickly becomes very difficult to maintain.
The Gambas Wiki states that Gambas is not VB, but it is a variant of Basic. Well, VB7 is also a Basic variant, but I can do pretty much what I want, including MVC patterns.
Rant and hiss all you want. This application has the potential to move an entire generation of mid-40ish "Windows and VB4 still works for me" people - who are basically stating the truth - to Linux / OSS enviroments.
And no Blahblah about Eclipse Basic being somewhere close to RAD or QTDevelop being a sort-of half way kinda RAD tool and "whats all the excitement about, I only need Perl and a few bazillion extra libs and dependency resoltions to write nice TK-Apps that are ugly as hell" will change that.
As for me, I'm sold. Congratulations to the Gambas team.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca