Gambas

Not to be confused with Viola da gamba.

Gambas

File:Gambas mascot.png
Appeared in	1999
Designed by	Benoît Minisini
Stable release	2.19.0 (January 4, 2010)
Influenced by	Visual Basic
OS	Linux
License	GNU General Public Licence
Website	http://gambas.sourceforge.net/

File:Gambas-ubuntu.png

Gambas 2.7 running under Ubuntu-8.10 with Russian interface

In software development, Gambas is an object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language, along with an integrated development environment to accompany it, which runs on Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems. It is intended to provide a similar experience for developing BASIC programs to Visual Basic. Gambas is intended to be an alternative for former Visual Basic developers who have decided to migrate to Linux.

'Gambas' is a recursive acronym for Gambas Almost Means Basic. Gambas is also the word for prawns in the Spanish language, from which the project's logo is derived.

Features

With Gambas developers can:

• Use databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Build KDE (QT) and GNOME GTK+ applications with DCOP.
• Translate Visual Basic programs to Gambas and run them under Linux.
• Build network solutions.
• Create CGI web applications.

Gambas is designed to build graphical applications programs using the Qt toolkit or the GTK+ toolkit; the Gambas IDE is written in Gambas itself. Gambas includes a GUI designer to aid in creating user interfaces.

Differences from Visual Basic

File:Gambas-2.7.0-fedora-blackbox.png

Gambas 2.7.0 running on Fedora Linux with Blackbox

While Gambas is intended to be easy to transition to from Visual Basic, there are important distinctions between the two languages. One notable example is that Gambas indexes arrays starting with 0 (0..n-1), whereas Visual Basic indexes can start with 0 or 1 and always end with n.

Development

The Gambas runtime environment is needed to run executables.

Gambas is included in a number of Linux distributions' repositories, such as Mandriva's, Debian’s, Fedora's, and Ubuntu's. There is a Windows version of Gambas which barely runs under the Cygwin environment. Graphical applications do not work under the Windows version^{[citation needed]}.

See also

• List of BASIC dialects
• GNAVI

References

• Differences from Visual Basic

External links

• Project website
• GambasForge - incubator for Gambas projects
• Gambas Programs at Freshmeat
• Gambas Examples on the Piga Software Wiki
• Tutorial Gambasu v Slovencine Software Wiki