Gambas

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Gambas 1.04 with an example project running on SuSE Linux 9.3 Professional in GNOME.

Gambas is a free, object orientated BASIC dialect, currently available for GNU/Linux only. It provides a graphical user interface and a GUI designer that resembles other visual development environment like Lazarus or Visual Basic. Although Gambas is not source code compatible with Visual Basic, it is a BASIC Interpreter with object-oriented extensions. Hence, Gambas is a real alternative for former VB developers who decide to migrate to GNU/Linux. It should be noted that the program will only run on 32-bit systems

Gambas makes it easy to build Linux GUI programs (the Gambas IDE is written in Gambas itself.) using the Qt toolkit. However, the Gambas runtime environment is needed to run executables. There is a Windows version of Gambas which barely runs under the Cygwin environment. Graphical applications do not work under the Windows version.

Developed in Paris by Benoît Minisini since 1999, Gambas is released under the GNU General Public Licence, the current version as of March 2006 is 1.0.15 Gambas is included in the SUSE Linux Professional Distribution 9.0.

'Gambas' is an recursive acronym for Gambas Almost Means BASic (Gambas is also the Spanish word for prawn and the Portuguese word gambá means 'Virginia Opossum'.)

With Gambas you can:

Use databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Build KDE applications with DCOP.
Translate Visual Basic programs to Gambas and run them under Linux.
Build network solutions.

1 Important Information About Gambas
2 Licensing
3 Programs Written in Gambas
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Important Information About Gambas

As its name implies, Gambas is close to Visual Basic. While Gambas may be easy to transition to from Visual Basic, there are important distinctions between the two languages. Those coming from Visual Basic should be aware of the differences from Visual Basic. One notable example is the fact that Gambas indexes arrays starting with 0 (0..n-1), whereas Visual Basic indexes starting with 1 (1..n).

[edit] Licensing

Licensing for developing propriety software with Gambas, according to the Gambas FAQ, is allowed. However, the only currently stable GUI component is the Qt_(toolkit) component, which requires Qt License be purchased before beginning work on propriety software.