GAMBAS True RAD, Open Source

I've just had my first play around with Gambas, an Open Source Project. It is a full IDE, with its own interpreted BASIC Object Oriented language.

This puppy is truly the cat's meow for non-programmers like me. It provides an easy to use development environment and has many of the bells and whistles that are present in commercial IDE Suites like M$ VB and .NET.

The Help is well put together and very concise and complete with cross references and links, lots of example code snippetts and entire example projects to steal fro^W^W...get inspiration from. There are wizards present for getting started and creating new projects, and even its own annoying little blue-shrimp mascot thingy to get in the way. In addition, there are lots of online GAMBAS source projects available to provide even more inspiration.

The language has libraries that can take advantage of the full range of functionality of projects & protocols like perl, XML, KDE, SDL, GTK+, and of course the various cli tools, programs and utilities. All of the routines and functions that you would expect are present, though there are some major differences between, say, VB and Gambas, not necessarily bad ones. Gambas is a native Linux Suite, so it runs much smoother and better overall than REAL Basic

I was able to throw together a quick project in a matter of minutes after installing the suite. To top it all off, the suite provides Wizards for creating & publishing source tarballs or pre-compiled RPM or DEB packages for various distros. I was able to create a working deb package of my little project and it installed without a hitch, and the binary it created actually ran when called from command line!

I think I've finally found a development kit on Linux that even a no-talent hack like me can create fully functional and feature rich apps with GUI and all on Linux with minimal knowledge and effort. This one is a keeper! I foresee many productive days of porting my shell script library in the future.

(Thanks 7 for the tip ;-)

-- rapskat - 07:22:20 up 11:28, 7 users, load average: 0.21, 0.30, 0.31 I called up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms regional office and asked, "What wine goes best with an M-16?" The guy who answered did his best to be helpful: "That depends. What are you smoking?"