[Gambas-devel] Gambas Development

[Rob Kudla]

On Wed August 23 2006 14:24, Scott, Vince wrote:
> 1.) What kinds of application are you creating?

Pretty much anything I would have done in VB if I worked for a 
Microsoft shop.  I've written Gambas apps for media management, 
document acquisition, legacy graphic terminal emulation, 
front-ends for literally dozens of command-line processes, 
document and media conversion, menu systems for operators, etc.

> 2.) Novell list this as a developing tool, when will it be
> considered ready? 

You'd have to talk to Novell regarding what it would take for 
them to consider it "ready".  Every app I have deployed into 
production has used Gambas 1.x, and I haven't run into any 
problems with Gambas itself.  In fact, some of them I was 
developing starting with about the 0.8x series without any 
trouble.

> 3.) What type of companies are using Gambas. 

My clients have been primarily banks, but also law firms, 
insurance companies, and a couple of small recording studios.

> 4.) What is the future of Gambas?

Well, Benoit has a "GambasFuture" document out on the wiki, but 
here's my take on it.

I expect that its version 2.0 will get more attention than the 
1.x series has, and might attract enough corporate money for 
people (at least Benoit but maybe a few other of the core guys) 
to develop it full time, while attracting more people like me 
who use it to grow their businesses and contribute code and 
resources.  I expect there to be a serious push to make a 
Windows version after the Gtk component is mature, to help with 
migration from Windows to Linux.

However, the current hype in programming is all about web-based 
stuff, which I also do an awful log of.  I think Gambas' two 
major business niches will be legacy VB app replacement, and 
front-ends to processes which shouldn't or can't be done from a 
web server.  If we ever get the gb.ajax.form type of thing up 
and running that we've been talking about lately, that has a lot 
of potential to attract attention as well.

> 5.) Is anyone building reuseable componants?

I did that in the pre-1.0 series when they were called libraries, 
but then those got discontinued.  However, I have written a 
number of components in C when I needed Linux API stuff that 
Gambas couldn't provide (external function use wasn't added till 
the 1.9 series.)

Rob