Slashdot Mirror
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."
A great disturbance in the Force.
It was like a million voices crying out in unison, then suddenly silenced.
Thank god the project page is already slashdotted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone who has been frustrated by a lack of production-quality free RAD environments
Nope, I have many available RAD environments which lack production-quality.
But seriously, what about Ruby, Python, and Perl. It seems like there have been plenty of RAD environments available for free.
Unless you count Kylix. It uses Pascal or C++ instead of Basic, but it's definitely a VB-style environment.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
...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.
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.
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!
Seems to be the most popular thing about any new release, even though most claim to prefer a CLI.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
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.
My Journal
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.
In portuguese the word gambá means skunk :-) Well, it is VB-like after all.
Still, I continue to think that Glade, and especially libglade, are the way to go in term of separations of UI and code.
Fabien Niñoles - Debian Maintainer
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.
The NetBeans IDE is also open source. It is a decent visual editor for Java Plataform development.
Anyone who has been frustrated by a lack of production-quality free RAD environments...
Production-quality free?
No, production quality is good.... Must be something else. Maybe they mis-hyphenated?
Production quality-free?
Argh....
Do we really need a VB clone in linuxland?
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.
It is in release status. And Eclipse has lots of amazing features that makes it a serious alternative to visual studio .net.
Downside is that swt (eclipse's gui toolkit) is a bit slow on linux at the moment.
Anyone who has been frustrated by a lack of production-quality free RAD environments should give it a try.
Personally I prefer Bodacious eviroments over Rad ones!
Either way, they've done the typical OSS thing: copied MS, circa 1997. Wow, we've managed to replicate Visual Basic 4. Meanwhile, .NET Architect is out there, using a powerful multi-language VM instead of a BASIC interpreter.
Well, who knows. Maybe when Parrot takes off they'll move over to that, so they can have a real OSS theme to it.
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.
As someone who has been monitoring the quality of software production (using our overhead satellite base station - don't bother looking for us, we cleverly painted stars on it - saved a buttload of $$$), I can tell you that it is not an oxy-moron.
After all, a certain company in Redmond has been using VB RAD tools for years...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
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.
1997? Oh come now. Its all about dynamic typing. In the next ten(?) years OSS and MS will both finally arrive at the peak of programming languages: VisualLisp.
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
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!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
I'm surprised noone has mentioned KBasic http://www.kbasic.org/1/index.htmlyet... Also about 2 year in the making, also made by a dedicated individual.
Last week, a non-functioning preview of this Qt-based Linux/Windows IDE (later to support Mac as well) was released, unfortunately only the Windows version. Tried it at work and it looked very nice.
The main thing it has going for me is a QBasic compatibility mode. If you set VERYOLDBASIC to true, the promise is that you then have a more or less capable Qbasic emulator. The only programming I have done was in QBasic about 10 years back. I tried VB when it first came out, but all that event driven, form defining cruft got on my nerves. I'll be very happy to be able to just type 'screen 13' and have some fun again with fractals, cellular automatons and other stupid graphics hacks ( slow as hell in the time of 16Mhz 386sx but soooo much fun...)
The downer to KBasic of course is that the Bern put in SO much work that he decided to charge for it. It'll only be $30 or so, so I'll probably pony up the cash but I guess a lot of people will be p*ssed off because of this. Ah well, it's his code, he gets to decide....
HBasic http://hbasic.sourceforge.net/ also seemed nice but seems to have run in a wall sometime in the last year...
For the Basic affectionados (sans Visual), there is of course the venerable XBasic http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/ and X11-Basic http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/ tools but these are frozen in time and not really in the same league.
.net is the answer to: ?xis sulp ruof si tahW
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.
How about Small Basic?
It is currently active and works on Palm, Windows, and Linux. It also comes with sample programs so you can see what it can do.
http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net/
Never been frustrated. Perl's been around for a long time.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
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.
About 20 versions ago I made an unofficial MDI version of the Gambas interface, and a new official MDI version is planned for the 1.1 series (like the old kernel numbering scheme, 1.odd will be development and 1.even will be stable.)
For what it's worth, it didn't take much coding at all (though I didn't do docking or any of that cool stuff), and I'm looking forward to using an MDI version again.
Just for posterity, here is my MDI hack. It long since stopped working with current Gambas releases due to changes in the rest of the IDE.
Xbasic has always seemed to me to be a lot closer to older BASIC dialects like Qbasic than to VB. Benoit really wanted to focus on object oriented programming (and removing a lot of the cruft that makes BASIC such a laughing stock... a quixotic pursuit since people who dislike BASIC will probably never give Gambas a try) rather than procedural stuff, if I'm not mistaken.
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
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
Well since Visual Basic.net is a bit of a bust going back to what worked well may not be such a bad thing
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You laugh, but Dr. Scheme sounds like a close fit to Visual Lisp.