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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."
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.
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.
...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.
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!
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 :/.
In portuguese the word gambá means skunk :-) Well, it is VB-like after all.
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.
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.
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.