[Gambas-user] Gambas Future or what kind of Gambas we want

[Nigel Verity]

Hi

I'm sure that we all acknowledge that Gambas plays much the same role on Linux that VB plays on Windows. I used to be a VB developer, but I'd far sooner work with Gambas any day, even if it could be run on Windows. That said, the fact is that VB does exist and, whatever we like to think, it is a good tool with a huge and enthusiastic user base. At best, fully migrating Gambas to Windows would put it in a similar position to GIMP on Windows. At a functional level GIMP stands up well against Photoshop for most users. Despite that people still pay good money for Photoshop because it is the "go to" image editor in most people's minds. In the same way, no matter how good Gambas is most people looking for a RAD tool on Windows would automatically opt for VB.

I have played around with Lazarus, which is a visual development environment based on FreePascal and generates native executables. It's harder to use than Gambas, but still a lot easier than Visual C++. It already has the advantage that there are versions for Linux, Windows and OSX, so you can develop a project on one OS and just recompile it to run on the others. On that basis it beats every other development tool hands down for portability and should dominate the market. For all that, most developers regardless of their OS, have probably never heard of it.

To my mind Gambas has been developed to satisfy a requirement on Linux and it does that brilliantly well. There's nothing that comes close in terms of functionality vs ease-of-use. My view is that just because something CAN be done doesn't mean that it MUST be done. The notion that Gambas, or any other FLOSS project, must strive for maximum market share is more than a nod towards the stance of commercial proprietary software which many of us strive to avoid.

The one thing I would like to see for Gambas is not so much functionality as improved awareness of one of its many capabilities. By combining Gambas with SQLite you have more or less a complete analog for MS Access. When I first came to Linux I struggled to find anything close to an Access equivalent. LibreOffice Base is far too complicated and slow. I'm sure there are many Linux users who would dearly love to have a powerful desktop database tool but don't realise that a solution is so readily available.

Regards

Nige