[Gambas-user] Gambas for Android

[Rob Kudla]

On 04/09/2012 02:12 AM, John Rose wrote:
> My starter posting on this topic was misleading in that it implied that
> I wanted Gambas to dev apps on Android which would run on Android.
> That's one possibility. However, it seems likely to me that this would
> require purchase of a high spec Android tablet to make dev not painful.

I agree. Being able to write code in BASIC+SQL on my phone is a neat
trick, but that's all it is... a trick. Even on my tablet, it's not
really a viable development environment, and probably wouldn't be even
if it had a GUI designer. I've done bug fixing on clients' web apps and
maintained their databases from my phone and tablet, but wouldn't want
to spend all day coding on either of them. If I end up ever doing
BASIC+SQL work for some reason, I'll be sshing to my phone from my
laptop to write the code, or possibly writing the code on my laptop and
using Dropbox or sftp to push it up.

What might be a nice solution would be a transpiler that would take
Gambas object code and compile it into Dalvik (Android JVM) bytecode.
When RMS suggested something similar for Gambas in general some years
ago, I thought it was a dumb idea, but in this case, it makes a lot of
sense to me.

I wouldn't have any idea where to begin, and even if I did, how to
handle GUI toolkit translation issues, how to make apps that look like
Android apps (with gesture and multitouch support) instead of desktop
apps jammed onto a tiny screen, etc. I don't think any of the commercial
options (such as Basic4Android) has addressed many of those issues
either, because they're not going to be easy to deal with. Desktop and
touch-based apps are fundamentally different (even if Microsoft and
Ubuntu would like to pretend otherwise).

Games might be an exception to this rule, but generally speaking,
creating an IDE that allows full-featured mobile and desktop apps to be
created from the same source is a really tall order.

Rob