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Free IDE Gambas Reaches 1.0
A few months ago, the GPL IDE Gambas reached 1.0 release candidate phase, and now reader drfreak writes "Gambas has now hit 1.0 and looks promising as GNU/Linux's answer to Visual Basic. Now, if it ran in Windows too, it would truly crush VB for database applications. Check it out at gambas.sourceforge.net." A 1.0.1 release came out on January 3rd to fix a few bugs.
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.
I don't believe any open source solution in any near future could crush the Microsoft alternatives in the software development field.
The problem is that HERE marketing matters. Home users are free to pick a web browser or operating system of their choice. But when a big system for some business/industry is being developed, the platform decisione are made by the middle-to-upper management. And these guys really -believe- what Microsoft marketing people tell them. So the programmers, people who actually know a thing about the options don't really get the voice in most of the projects. "So... This guy at EXPO told me Visual Basic would solve all these problems. So we write the application in Visual Basic." There is no way the majority of the "big fishes" in programming could accept a hardly known free software language instead of the "famous, widely used Microsoft product" without the right marketing, and without some large funding behind the marketing...
Unless Sun, IBM or someone else with enough $$$ and not too much love for Microsoft backs up the project and takes care of marketing and promoting it. But the chances are very slim.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I don't think they are copying either windows or mac, they are merely following what have been the unix way for the last 10 years. On unix we have virtual desktops and they are there to be used.
One glance at your post tells me you are trolling. So one look at a screenshot that is probably meant to showcase as much of the application as possible tells you that it is cluttered and unusable?
I'm impressed.
I'm also getting tired of this constant whining about not doing it the MS way. Interestingly I never see these kind of complaints about OSX software, though even MS products are not using an MDI interface on OSX. So not doing it the MS way certainly doesn't say anything about the usability of an app.
No, it's not ok.
I wonder how tightly this is tied to the Basic implementation, and if it would be possible to switch the underlying language to something decent - say, python - without basically rewriting the whole mess?
I agree with your sentiments, despite what other may say. That is/was the biggest turn off for Gimp for me. I actually find it to be an obstacle in using the program because there is nothing tying them together (maybe it's a coneptual gap, I don't like having to think about it every time). I don't necessarally need my applications to all have slide-out tool panes like Visual Studio, but a background container with the option to dock windows on the sides or toolbar does wonders for keeping all the various bits of the application together, allowing me to focus on doing what I am doing without accidentally switching focus to a browser or terminal I left open.
Sure once I get everything shuffled to another window I don't worry as much, and some people might be comfortable "outside the box" with their applications, but I would prefer to stay inside the box, thank you. I don't think this is a revolutionary interface design concept, I think it is an interesting one that doesn't quite work as well as was expected.
If I am going to work on an application then my preference would be to siomply work on it, without pausing every 5 seconds to think about where to find a toolbox i sent to the background. Now in window 3 of 4 and crap, did I lose 4 somewhere?
That's one of the elements I liked about Paintshop Pro: the floating, dockable, collapsible menus. Everything was kept in the one application area and you could pretty much put the boxes anywhere you wanted, but being inside that window made the toolboxes naturally belong to the application. Plus I could get more screen acreage simply by allowing them to collapse, without losing them into the background.
Whee signature.
Alright, slow down, here comes some hard to grok stuff:
Everything cool? Ok, let's go on...
Do you think that it's possible that the Linux community consists of DIFFERENT personalities with DIFFERENT opinions? Just maybe? And that the people who hate VB still hate VB and others who didn't think VB sucks to start with started this project?
I know, I know, this was too hard for you, but maybe try to sleep a few nights over it, maybe one day you will be able to understand such difficult concepts...
Loads of top-level tool windows is a usability nightmare. It os not intuitive at all, and a new user has a hell of a time figuring out what things are in what window.
There is a reason both the Gnome and KDE projects have HCI guidelines. And this app doesn't follow either of them.
I actually downloaded the source a few days ago and compiled and installed it. I find that it is a extremely well done VB like environement for linux. Any day I can get a decent programming ide complete with the source and licensed under the GPL it is a wonderful day.
1. The app uses multiple windows but guess what if you don't like that then make it a single window interface. The ide is written in gambus so a little refactoring and you can have a single window interface.
2. It is extremely complete for a 1.0 release and the design of the interpreter, debugger, libraries are all rather complete.
3. I can build a gui front end to a my sql table with barely a dozen lines of code.
4. The language is not actually VB it is improved and corrected VB.
5. It had a project packager that is extremely well done.
6. The forms designer is fairly top notch and easy to work with.
Ok when all you cry babies get done writing your own interpreter, compiler, ide and make it work even half as well come back and talk to me, till then shut up. No I have no involvment in the project other than using it a little but I applaud the developer for his efforts.
It is a gift people, treat it as such...
Got Code?
God, you people can be such bastards.... .NET? .NET compatibility, Python plug-ins etc.
Here is a guy, single handedly building a full, self-hosted, VB-like development environment on Linux as a gift to the community and all you people do is shit all over his project.
Why Basic? Why QT? Why MDI? Why funny pictures on the main page? Why not
Python is better! Realbasic is better! Mono is better!
It's open source for crying out loud!! Don't like MDI? Change it! (after all it is self hosting) Think REALBasic is better? Fine, go buy that then! Prefer Mono's VB? OK, sit around and wait a bit longer. Don't like the site's informal look? Where is your mockup of a better one then?
Let's face it. The only reason you're all bitching (most of you anyways..) is that you're too THICK to change any of it! I'm reading the developer forum and I see no patches coming in from any of you offering SDI, GTK+,
Bunch of ingrates....