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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 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....