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Migrating Visual Basic Applications?

Posted by Cliff on from the from-dogs-to-penguins dept.

goose69 asks: "I was looking at the various options available to migrate Visual Basic applications on to GNU/Linux , as usual the choices were many from Free Solutions like wxWindows, Gambas, vb2py, to proprietary ones like Phoenix, and so on. Unfortunately, Mono was too much with its multiple licenses. I want to know if anyone out there has done a successful migrations from Visual Basic on Windows to any application framework on GNU/Linux."

2 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Depends on the Coupling by scottsevertson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Even poor *quality* code can be *ported* easily to another platform/language, but only if the code is not highly coupled to the interface.

    Case in point: I'm currently porting a portion of a PowerBuilder app [88k+ LOC] to Java. Fortunately, the code is not coupled to the interface (other than poping up message boxes for errors, due to PB's lack of exception handling).

    My strategy? ~50 regular expressions to translate the syntax between PB and Java, plus ~30 classes emulating the PowerBuilder functions/libraries used by the code. The code quality is the same as it was before, but I had successful test cases running less than 3 weeks after starting the project (including developing the regular expressions and the support classes). If that's all you need, you can stop there.

    I got away with this strategy because the code wasn't coupled to the interface. The code *was* tied heavily to the database, but it's much easier to mock up data access than it is to recreate a visual interface.

    On the other hand, if you're talking about re-writing or cleaning up the code in the process, that's another story entirely. I've spent the past three months reworking the ported code to use Java idioms, decoupling it from the data layer, and refactoring the "almost re-typed with subtle code differences" sections; if the original code had been higher quality, the project would have been done two months ago.

    --


    Scott Severtson
    Senior Architect, Digital Measures
  2. Re:You may not like it, but.... by Omega996 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not sure there's a version of RealBASIC that actually runs on Linux. I think it's more like a compiler target. Maybe with their next version (should be out soon) there'll be something that actually allows Linux dev on Linux.

    More info here, I think...

    http://www.realsoftware.com/realbasic/guides/porti ngvisualbasic/