VB(ish) replacement

[Dave Boland]

The other day I was asked if there is an open source replacement for VB6
that is cross-platform. I spent a little bit of time at Barnes-Noble
and looking at news groups, but don't have a good answer. Hope you can
help without geting into a language war. These will be for commercial
applications with a GUI.

What they seem to be looking for is:
1. High level language, but not necessarly VB compatible.
2. OOP
3. Reasonalble learning curve
4. Cross-platform
5. IDE and ability to graphically design windows.
6. Distribute programs as .exe's, so some sort of compiler needed.
7. Serial communications library (RS-232, 485, USB)
8. SNMP library
9. Good performance (not expected to be as fast as C/C++)
10. Windows are native to each O.S.
11. Database support of Access and MySQL

It looks like any of the three languages have most or all of what they
need, but I don't use scripting languages enough to give a good answer.

Dave,

 

[Larry Bates]

Others have answered most of the other questions.

11. Database support of Access and MySQL

Access databases can be accessed via ODBC,
DAO, or ADO interfaces on Windows. MySQL has
native interface from Python.

Questions you didn't ask:

12) Can interface to existing COM+ objects, write new
COM+ objects and write Windows services.

Python

13) Can write scripts, applications (console and GUI),
and web services with single language.

Python

14) Has extensive standard library to support email
(SMTP, IMAP), FTP, HTTP, logging, regular expressions,
arrays, and many more. Third party libraries for
imaging (Python Imaging Library), PDF generation
(ReportLab), Graphing (ReportLab Graphics) and
XML parsing (PyRXP by ReportLab). Just to name a
few.

Python

15) Easy to write C language extensions for language

Python

16) Code that you can actually understand when you
come back to read it a year later.

Python (priceless ;-)

You might want to take a look at the experience of
another company:

http://python.oreilly.com/news/disney_0201.html

HTH,
Larry Bates
Syscon, Inc.

 

[Scott Rubin]

The other day I was asked if there is an open source replacement for VB6
that is cross-platform. I spent a little bit of time at Barnes-Noble
and looking at news groups, but don't have a good answer. Hope you can
help without geting into a language war. These will be for commercial
applications with a GUI.

What they seem to be looking for is:
1. High level language, but not necessarly VB compatible.
2. OOP
3. Reasonalble learning curve
4. Cross-platform
5. IDE and ability to graphically design windows.
6. Distribute programs as .exe's, so some sort of compiler needed.
7. Serial communications library (RS-232, 485, USB)
8. SNMP library
9. Good performance (not expected to be as fast as C/C++)
10. Windows are native to each O.S.
11. Database support of Access and MySQL

It looks like any of the three languages have most or all of what they
need, but I don't use scripting languages enough to give a good answer.

Dave,

I'm fairly certain you can use python and glade together to make cross
platform GTK+ guis in a graphical way. I'm also fairly certain that it
meets all your requirements. There might be a way to use glade with
other gtk supporting languages. Also, KDevelop I think can do the same
with Qt stuff, but I don't know for sure since I haven't used it in a
long time. Don't you have any programmers who can make guis the "real"
way instead of drawing them with a VB type interface? it's not that hard
if you draw them on paper with a pencil and plan them out first.

-Scott

 

[John J. Lee]

What they seem to be looking for is:
1. High level language, but not necessarly VB compatible.
2. OOP
3. Reasonalble learning curve
4. Cross-platform
5. IDE and ability to graphically design windows.
6. Distribute programs as .exe's, so some sort of compiler needed.
7. Serial communications library (RS-232, 485, USB)
8. SNMP library
9. Good performance (not expected to be as fast as C/C++)
10. Windows are native to each O.S.
11. Database support of Access and MySQL

It looks like any of the three languages have most or all of what they
need, but I don't use scripting languages enough to give a good answer.

Can't speak for Ruby, but I'm fairly sure both Perl and Python do fine
on all points but 3.

Python does fine on the remaining point. Perl fails *badly* here:

http://www.google.com/[email protected]&selm=D87u12z90eq.fsf%40pobox.com


I've used a fair number of programming languages. Perl is the only
one I'd unhesitatingly call 'pathological'. And I do speak as an
admirer of the language: before Python was around and well-supported,
it served an important purpose. Now, though, it fills a much-needed
gap <wink>


John

 

[Joshua Kugler]

If you are looking to stay close to VB, here are some to look at:

http://hbasic.sourceforge.net/
http://gambas.sourceforge.net/

Or for something completely different:
http://www.naken.cc/vb2c/

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gb/
Gnome basic, now dead. However, mbas, the Mono Basic *is* alive and well,
and might be what you are looking for: http://www.go-mono.com/mbas.html
(site not accessible at time of post).

I may start a flame war with this, but from what I understand, VB is
actually a distant descendant of Ruby. So, that might tell you something.

j----- k-----