Gambas or Something Else?

jrbush82 · 10-26-2004, 03:18 PM

I have always wanted to get more involved with programming in a compiled language, rather than just web development utilizing scripting languages. I have touched a little bit with perl and php (enough to get by on) and know HTML by the back of my hand.

I have recently been pondering on what language to learn, whether to get truely involved with PHP, or go with something else. I have taken three courses in C++, but I can't say I enjoyed it much. With just learning about Gambas (/.), I like the idea of it being like Visual Basic, but for Linux. Does anybody have any success stories, or other suggestions the newbies starting to program in the Linux environment?

Thanks,
Jason Bush

neilman · 10-27-2004, 07:57 AM

It sounds like you're wanting to start developing apps with a GUI, instead of just text based scripts for web backend applications. Gambas is worth looking into -- I read the same /. story as you; however, since you're already familiar with Perl, I would look into wxWidgets. Here's a synopsis from their site:

Quote:

wxWidgets gives you a single, easy-to-use API for writing GUI applications on multiple platforms. Link with the appropriate library for your platform (Windows/Unix/Mac, others coming shortly) and compiler (almost any popular C++ compiler), and your application will adopt the look and feel appropriate to that platform. On top of great GUI functionality, wxWidgets gives you: online help, network programming, streams, clipboard and drag and drop, multithreading, image loading and saving in a variety of popular formats, database support, HTML viewing and printing, and much much more.

With that, you would use wxPerl as a wrapper for the wxWidgets C++ GUI toolkit. So, using standard Perl code and that library, you can be popping out "hello world" that looks like this, instead: http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/sshot01.html