[Gambas-user] About the Gambas article

[Rob]

On Thursday 06 December 2007 15:02, Fabien Bodard wrote:
> > Getting a prominent blogger to notice the imminent release of
> > Gambas 2.0 would probably help, but there's so much more hype
> > about Ajax and other web technologies nowadays that traditional
> > desktop development tends to fly under the radar.
> And in other side this explain the ajax fashion... but ajax, in
> fact is a pseudo technologie... I don't understand the facination
> that all people have for that...

You're right, it's not a language or platform or toolkit, just a 
buzzword that can refer to a lot of different techniques.  But 
fundamentally, it's a way to make web applications that are usable by 
people who run any modern OS and are nearly as responsive as desktop 
applications, without relying on awkward, sometimes incompatible 
plugins or applets.  

That's why people are fascinated by it, mostly due to Google's very 
visible products (if Gmail or Google Maps didn't get their attention, 
I'm pretty sure Google Docs did.)  But the awkwardness you remove by 
not using Java or Flash comes back to you when you try to write a big 
system using it, something I still hope to simplify one day using 
Gambas.  

I already converted a big Access/VB app to a Perl CGI-based Ajax app 
by importing the VB forms into Gambas, and writing a framework (which 
was awkward, slow, and loaded down with one customer's business 
logic) to convert those forms to XHTML, add Javascript event handlers 
for each element, populate them from MySQL, and update the data on 
the server side after each change, transparently to the user.  It 
would also generate PDF, ODT or DOC files of the reports and send 
them down to the browser.  It was a huge pain, but I started it 
before the term Ajax was coined.  There are toolkits available now 
that can help people a lot when they do that sort of thing.

I can convert a VB app to a Gambas app much more easily, but then the 
client has to commit to a Linux desktop.  Maybe they're doing that in 
Europe, but very few American companies are doing that.  A web-based 
application means they can keep using whatever OS they have and not 
have to install an app on each user's machine, just send them a 
bookmark.

There are many apps which aren't well-suited for conversion to the web 
using Ajax, like anything that touches the local machine's hardware 
(specialized backup/burning, multimedia/games, anything that needs 
serial or parallel port access or fine control over keyboard input, 
anything that needs to print directly rather than generating a PDF, 
etc.) and for those I certainly prefer Gambas over anything else.  
But for apps that are primarily data entry and calculations, that 
don't need fancy paper handling or communication with special 
hardware, I think using Ajax techniques has made the browser a lot 
more viable as a platform.

Rob