[Gambas-user] New to gambas. Have a few questions.

[Rob]

On Monday 21 February 2005 05:42, Lord Jester wrote:
> I do have a few questions. First off what exactly is Gambas
> capable of at this moment? I've had a project in my head for
> several years now, and after seeing Gambas I think that's
> where I'll start it. It's just a 'thing' of sorts with an all
> in one interface for web, text, etc.

Gambas 1.x is suitable for most front-end type of applications, 
quite suitable for MySQL/Postgres/standalone database 
applications, and lots of us have used it for all kinds of more 
involved applications (see the "big projects in Gambas" thread 
from a couple weeks ago in the archives.) It's really pretty 
open-ended, and you can drive all kinds of background processes 
using SHELL and the Process object to access functionality that 
isn't native to Gambas yet.

I wouldn't recommend Gambas 1.x for applications requiring heavy 
text processing (because I hadn't finished the pcre component by 
then), fast graphical performance (because there wasn't an SDL 
graphics component yet), or ODBC (ditto.) I'm sure there are 
other libraries out there that Gambas still needs components 
for, but all of the above are now present in the development 
versions of Gambas 2.

I don't know if part of your goal is to implement a web browser, 
but I think the scripting will be a killer... there is a 
KDE-based web browser component, but I don't think it gives you 
access to the DOM and there's certainly no Javascript component 
available for Gambas yet. However, I have helped a client 
implement a highly customized text editor in Gambas, and I think 
for displaying static HTML documents (or using the browser as a 
preview, if you're writing an HTML editor) you'd do fine.

> About fakebas, how exactly do I compile this? I see it's
> written in Java.. Perhaps just loading it up in Eclipse and
> compiling will work?

Fakebas is actually written in Gambas (just as the Gambas IDE 
itself is.)  There are .class files in there because Benoit 
chose .class as the file extension for Gambas classes.  
(oops...)  If you have Gambas installed, go into the fakebas 
directory and type

gbc
gba

gbc will compile it, and gba will make the fakebas executable.  
(Instead of gba, you could have run gbx and it would have run 
fakebas without making an executable.)  Of course, the easiest 
way to compile a Gambas app is to load it up in gambas itself 
and select the "make executable" menu item, but since you're 
trying to compile an alternative Gambas IDE, I'm assuming you're 
not familiar with the original IDE that ships with Gambas.

Rob