Gambas towards 2.0

By: Luigi Paiella - software [ aa tt ] pajella [ dd oo tt ] com

First published Saturday December 02, 2006

Gambas is a wonderful, easy IDE (Integrated Development Environment ) that lets you build visual (and not visual) applications for Linux very, very quickly.
The initial release was made on 2002, and release 1.0 was available in January 2005.
Bug fixing continues on version 1.0.x (the actual release is 1.0.17), while its author, Benoît Minisini, started the development version, Gambas2, with the 1.9.x revision number.

Installation
Gambas download page contains the compressed source code, but also binary versions for many different distributions. If you are using, like me, a Debian based distribution, the installation is pretty simple: add the line

deb http://apt.linex.org/linex/gambas/1.9.43/sid/ ./

to the "/etc/apt/sources.list" file, and run your favorite packaging manager.
For examples, with Synaptic you can press "Reload" to update the list of available packages, search for "gambas2" packages, and install them all. At the end, you will find "Gambas2" in the Development group of your KDE menu.
Gambas2 can be installed in parallel with Gambas 1.0. No fear of interfering with your Gambas "production" environment: the executables, libraries and components have different names and are totally separated.

New features
Gambas2 contains visible improvements everywhere, even in the very first window: the "Open project..." dialog, in fact, now contains an information window showing application's icon, version, title, description, and authors. Many examples have been added with more code ready to be reused.
In add, the "New Project" wizard make easier choosing the type of project you are going to start: graphical with QT, graphical with GTK+, command line based or SDL application. Some options provide automatically to the new project the needed components.

Once opened a project, instead of multiple windows, the environment present itself in a clean and intuitive MDI (Multiple Document Interface) form: all the windows (Project, Properties, Toolbox, Hierarchy, but not Console) are contained in the main window and are visible at once; functions keys can show or hide them. Also the project translation window (no longer available in the project property window but in the project menu) has been improved and makes finally clear which languages are already available in the project.

Another big improvement is the introduction of the new graphical GTK+ toolkit component. Gambas 1.0.x has, in fact, graphical user interface classes based exclusively on QT.
In general, QT is a good choice: it performs in a solid way, its controls are well shaped, and all of them are fully functional in Gambas, but the license of the freely available QT version (the one contained in Gambas and Gambas2) does require you to develop open source software only.
If you want to make a commercial application in Gambas 1.0.x, you have to purchase a QT license, or to make a just console based application.
Now, GTK+ (whose license allows commercial software creation) permits to Gambas2 developers a wider licensing option.
Unfortunately the development of the GTK+ component is not complete, and even if, in theory, selecting gb.gtk in the component window would be enough to switch from QT to GTK+, in reality, some aspects are not yet working and others require some adjustment.
For example, the ListView component is not fully usable because the most part of the methods are not working yet, even if they are shown as available.

The list of Gambas2 new components is very interesting. In particular there are: gb.crypt (to let you cipher and decipher through DES or MD5 algorithm), gb.form.mdi (to handle MDI projects), gb.pcrs (it provides regular expression matching compatible with Perl to enable sophisticate data parsing), gb.pdf (a PDF render component based on Poppler library), gb.opengl (for OpenGL graphics), and gb.net.smtp to send email (client side) from gambas application's via SMTP.

In add, now, it's possible to save string arrays in a configuration file, there is an experimental support for component development, and help based on a static version of Gambas Wiki accessible through an external browser. Arguments can now be given to the application through options in the debug menu and can be quickly enabled and disabled.

Also "Database Manager" tool has been improved with a new dialog to allow an easy import of CSV files.
Last but not least, mouse selection now supports copy and paste.

Projects migration

The projects need to be recompiled completely, not only when switching from Gambas to Gambas2 but frequently even between two consecutive Gambas2 revisions. Compile does require a short time and, usually the code compiles straight, but in some cases the changes introduced in Gambas2 structure do require some adjustment.
The first thing I found while converting my projects is that settings stored in a configuration file now require a specific component (gb.settings) to be added to the project while in Gambas 1.0.x settings were available out of the box. Another small difficulty is that the system.Home property (used to identify the user home directory) doesn't exist anymore: more logically, in fact, the property has become user.Home. A simple search and replace (by the way made trough the new improved searching interface) did the trick: at this point my applications could start.

Global evaluation

Gambas has undergone a deep improvement and the effort and assiduity put by Benoît and the other developers is consistent: 23 releases just in 2006 !

Many new features have been added but still keeping it a simple language, supported by an active community of developers and users.

As per my personal wish list, I would like to have the possibility to create a standalone package containing the application, the interpreter, and needed libraries in a static form to be able to move quickly one application from one computer to another, without the need to install Gambas environment.

In add, I'd like to see a Windows(tm) version of Gambas: Gambas is very suitable for small applications that sometimes don't require setting up a full Linux box, and, on the other side, I'm sure that a simple but performant Visual Basic (tm) like language would be very appreciated on Windows(tm) and would move more people to the benefit of open source.

back