Gambas (in particular) and Linux (in general)

Compiling and Installing Gambas 3

charlesg628 — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:59:49 +0000

Gambas 3 has now been released. Development of Gambas 2 and some of its components (particularly the QT3 toolkit) has ended. That, in itself, should not be a problem and Gambas 2 should be available from distributions for some time to come.

If you are new to Gambas, I would recommend that you start using Gambas 3 now. It is sufficiently different from Gambas 2 to make later conversion of Gambas 2 projects to gambas 3 a frustration.

Unfortunately Gambas 3 is not yet in any distribution repository yet so this involves installing Gambas 3 from source code. This might be intimidating for new Linux users so I have written the note on the right to show a hopefully easy-to-follow process. These instructions work on all Ubuntu versions (I have only installed on 11.04 in Gnome rather than Unity desktop) as well as Linux Mint 11 and I guess most Ubuntu derivatives. The process is similar for other distributions.

Am I still using Gambas?

charlesg628 — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 13:44:39 +0000

There has been a comment left on this blog asking if I have given up writing code in Gambas. Well, the answer (as with most answers) is yes and no.

As you can see elsewhere on the blog, we were using POS software written in Gambas to run my small retail business. We had a major staff problem just less than a year ago and found that card transactions were being rung up on the (separate) card machine but were then being cancelled from the POS screen before finalisation. The theory being that the customer was generally happy with the card slips and did not need a separate till slip. The money was then taken from the till to cover the excess and the till balanced at the end of the day.

I decided that we would have to integrate the card acceptance with the POS programme. The only solution I could find here in the UK was Ocius from Commidea. Needless to say they did not have a Linux solution which surprised me as I thought Linux was ideally suited to POS. Even worse, it was written in the dreaded .Net. Talk about an elephant to crack a nut.

My Gambas software would not translate onto Windows so I went and bought Windows POS software from a vendor who specialises in our trade. The bought software is much more comprehensive than mine would ever have been (home grown software is always ‘work-in-progress’!) but by definition caters for requirements well beyond my needs. I am disappointed firstly because I enjoyed writing the software and secondly because I have walked back into the arms of M$.

I still use Gambas particularly for manipulation of text files but no longer use it on a daily basis. I still prefer Linux although I must admit that Windows 7 is not at all bad.

Using containers to make Gambas applications behave.

charlesg628 — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:43:26 +0000

I have put a tutorial in a page on the right hand side. Containers are not actually something I use very much but I do think the existing documentation is not very helpful when you do need a window to behave like a window oughta.

Fsarchiver is one useful piece of software

charlesg628 — Sun, 23 May 2010 10:13:15 +0000

I have put a page on the right with my experiences using this super piece of backup software.

Creating a database and tables from within Gambas.

charlesg628 — Sun, 16 May 2010 07:49:06 +0000

I wrote this little demo program some time ago. It is in the pages on the right.

It might help somebody.

Ubuntu Forum beginners challenge #9

charlesg628 — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:42:21 +0000

I wrote the following short program as a response to a ‘beginners programming challenge’ on the Ubuntu forum. I just got so tired of all the terminal-based solutions and chided the contestants that even phones had GUIs these days! It was kind of difficult separating original entries from rehash/error-correction but the tallies (by the time enthusiasm seems to have got lost) was:

PHP 11
C 4
Java 4
Python 4
Bash 2
C++ 1
Gambas 1
Haskell 1
Lisp 1
OO Spreadsheet 1
Perl 1
Scheme 1
Userland/awk 1

I didn’t see much evidence of ‘beginners’ in the entrants.

Anyway the brief was:
Your program should be able to open a text file and read its contents. The file will consist only of LOWERCASE letters and numbers 0-9. The file will be formatted such that there is only one alphanumeric character per line.
Your program must read each line and store the data in a data structure of your choice. Parse through your structure and print out the following information:

1. The sum of all the individual digits.
2. How many times each character appeared in the file.

I have put the code in a page on the right. It just needs a few standard objects on the form: a filechooser (default name filechooser1), a listbox (listbox1), a button named btnExit and a button named btnRun. If any real ‘beginner’ needs help to get this going, just shout.

It is easy enough to cut and paste from the blog although I have also put the source code as a tar.gz at Prog Challenge Source.

Gambas also does a good job at compiling run-time versions of applications and I have put a Debian package installer at Prog Challenge Installer.

Gambas FTPClient

charlesg628 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:29:14 +0000

FTP (File transfer protocol) is used to send and receive files over the internet. I have issue with a lot of the supplied Gambas examples in that they often over-complicate the process they are trying to demonstrate. New users, searching for the answer to a particular problem, need the bare-bones answer: something on which they themselves can then build. Searching on ‘Gambas’ and ‘FTP’ currently leads to samples of amazing complexity with timers and event-logs all over the place to the point where you just can’t get the essence of the sample itself.

Well here is the bare-bones of FTP in Gambas:

‘ Gambas class file
PRIVATE myFTPClient AS NEW FtpClient

PUBLIC SUB Button1_Click()

myFTPClient.URL=”ftp.drivehq.com/Documents/FileToSave.txt”
myFTPClient.User = “fred”
myFTPClient.Password = “dog”

myFTPClient.Put(“/home/fred/FileToGo.txt”)
END

Now, how simple is that? The .URL includes the file name on the ftp server and the .Put gives the local filename that you want to send. You won’t be surprised to hear that there is a .get method to do it the other way round.

Ideally you would do a bit more e.g. monitor theFTPClient.status to check completion.

Make sure you click on networking components when you create the project (or click on gb.net and gb.net.curl in project,properties,components)

Gridview and the Data Handling Event

charlesg628 — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:43:36 +0000

I have put a short tutorial about this very useful feature in a page on the right.

Tutorial Update

charlesg628 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:12:56 +0000

I have updated the tutorial and renamed it Gambas 2.8 on Ubuntu 9.04 (in pages on the right). I have just removed the reference to the external repository (which no longer worked).

It would be nice if Ubuntu could offer a more up-to-date version of Gambas. Other distros seem to manage it. Actually, even Gambas 2.8 is quite usable.

As mentioned the current stable version is 2.19.0 and compiles from source quite reliably on Ubuntu 9.10. The development version of Gambas 3 is (I guess) nearly ready.

Dropbox and encryption

charlesg628 — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:46:03 +0000

I have put a few notes in a page on the right and shown how file encryption can be included in a Gambas program. Obviously the logic can be used from other programming language as well.