GUI and Rapid Application Development 1538

Most simple applications that I dealt with did not need the use of API at all. In a few minutes a polished and tested application would be on the clients desktop. The point I was interested in is, with a language that one knows well, is it faster to develop easy-to-use GUIs on Linux as compared to other OSes

Yes, it does. Rather, VB can use vbScript's RE library. It should be under references (Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions library or something similar).

Depends on what one is parsing. Never benchmarked Perl's RegEx and VbScript's RegEx, but I could try. I imagine Perl is faster, so I think this argument is a good one. A few milliseconds here and there doesnt matter. I am looking at comparing simple applications' GUI development speed on different platforms. Yes, my Perl scripts are more compact than VB code in most applications.

KOffice-OpenOffice integration with a programming language on Linux could be tried. End users simply wanted Excel or Excel-like output in the above example. I could ignore this argument anyway

I think most languages parse CSV pretty well. Its more to do with performance of an application and not the speed of development. I would favor Perl, but thats not my point of interest in this topic, atleast.

Thats true. Well designed programs run any problems. I have written my share of good programs that run great. Off topic - but some ugly BASIC and Fortran programs built in mid-90s still work super. I should try a bit more on Perl-Tk or Tcl-Tk to add an extra layer to skill sets. But my friend, I am interested in knowing opinion on how fast a polished application was developed for GUI folks on Linux-Windows.

Well, thats common on any OS. Cron is available for most OSes (including Windows) natively or separately. Our several 24-7 Linux, Unix and Windows machines all use cron and-or different type of scheduler. Several hours saved weekly on Windows is equivalent to time saved on Unix, even if equated on a daily basis (my units were different than yours, thats the only difference I guess). While bash-csh-C-Perl-PHP-CLI scripts do the job on Linux, vbs-wsh-Perl-VS(.NET)-PHP-CLI scripts do it on Windows and all with *NO* user attention. Adding one more step to it is that most programs "gui". Users that find GUI easier to use can use a GUI-only application. On Linux my Perl scripts write failure-success logs and email the client of any major error; .NET does the same thing. I write and deploy polished applications faster on Windows and want to do that on Linux as well. Certainly, Perl is my preference for non-GUI scripts. Perl-Tk looks to be worth visiting.

Thats right. Most colleagues have mentioned about its speed of development. Thats the bottom line that helped this discussion that a equivalent development environment to create simple GUI applications on Linux is Perl-Tk or Tcl-Tk.

Hmm, I havent come across that situation before so I dont know how uncomfortable VB(.NET) is. I am guessing there should be some modules we could use to control properties of objects on-the-fly. How does Tcl-Tk fare?

One could write codes in notepad in framework too, right? Just that VS(.NET) IDE is pretty decent. Its my belief that it helps when most developers use a common IDE for development. Use WebMatrix - thats good too. There are alternatives: There could be more.

Write in notepad and compile programs using command line tools. And there could be other alternatives out there that you and I dont know.

Same with framework too. I think even VS.

We are now moving into discussion of our favorite development environment that relates to speed of development for sure, but that has not been discussed at all, unfortunately

I like VI on Linux-Unixes, .NET IDE on Windows

Oh, perl is outstanding, no doubt about that. That does not make my development any faster on Perl than .NET though. Perhaps its my lower skill level in Perl than .NET (maybe not, just that I am slow in navigating in my favorite `vi` editor). I do Ctrl+F5 in VB faster than typing perl -wc. Well, depends on mood too. I just realized I did --

True, but cant version control be achieved with `vi` or .NET? Heard about subversion, nunit or similar sounding additions for version control in .NET. There was a little hype one time among my colleagues about CVSNT. Never tried any of those. Well, talking about simple applications, there's hardly anything that goes wrong unless I dont know what I am doing. In any case, backups help.

That hasnt been difficult on any OS or groomed development environment, has it?

Coding = Typing code. Works just fine from DOS-Solaris.

I dont know if there is anything in .NET studio but specialized packages could easily do that, I am sure. If a professor driving in a car can dictate a research paper to his MS Word package on his Windows machine several miles away, there should be something for VS.NET also. Doesnt Windows have accessibility like that inbuilt? I dont know for sure, but maybe it does and maybe it might work for VS.NET IDE too.

I will try out a few different varieties of programs using VS(.NET) and Tcl-Tk (or Perl-Tk) and will post my findings.

Chirag Shukla.