[gnome-love] A RAD for GNOME?

[news optimistic co uk]

Dear Everyone,

Over the past few weeks, I have been musing over a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for GNOME. 
Here are my ideas in (I hope) fairly coherent form. I would be most appreciative of anyone prepared to read 
and think about this admittedly quite lengthy proposition, and I hope you will agree that it is worthwhile.

I am a Linux convert from the communities of both MacOS and Windows, and I have programmed in REALBasic and 
Microsoft Visual Basic. I have also had a good go at GNOME programming, and intend to continue.

One of the main reasons why I think this idea is important is because REALBasic, VisualBasic and other such 
products have  had a profound impact upon their respective platforms. They have brought life to the ambitions 
of novice programmers who previously would have had to learn difficult languages and rediculous APIs in order 
to write programs on their native platform. The Internet is teeming with programs written in RAD 
environments, from RB to VB to Delphi to QuickBasic (which has unfortunately just about breathed its last).

In short, it would be fair to say that these tools have attracted many programmers and have created many 
useful programs (http://www.realbasic.com has a very extensive list of good programs written in REALBasic, 
and awards prizes for the very best programs of all).

When learning to program in GNOME, I found that one of the chief impediments was that there seemed to be many 
ways to approach the subject, none of them very simple. After reading some of Havoc Pennington's book on 
GNOME programming and a handful of Glade tutorials, I managed to get started. It took me about a day and a 
half to do in GNOME what a novice VB programmer could probably do in a few hours - to write a simple program 
a little more sophisticated than good old 'hello world'. It was relatively simple for me, of course. I had 
learned C previously, and I have a reasonable amount of experience with a fair number of programming 
environments/APIs/languages. For a programming novice, this would be a very hard and no doubt extremely 
time-consuming task.

How, then, should less experienced users than myself be drawn to writing great GNOME programs? My first 
thought is a RAD environment. When I was new to programming, and tried VB, it took about an hour at most to 
get some kind of foothold - it was really simple.

So far I have found two RAD environments for Linux (which I must confess I haven't tried yet), Borland Kylix 
and GAMBAS, by Benoit Minisini. The biggest problem with both of these is that neither of them give that 
distinctive GNOME look. Kylix looks like something out of KDE/Qt (which I think it is), and  GAMBAS looks far 
too like Windows (ugh!). This is why I think that GNOME should have its own RAD environment, for novice and 
advanced programmers alike to quickly create functional programs. I am not suggesting for a moment that the 
GNOME/GTK project should abolish C as its primary language. It is still a good way to create good programs 
for GNOME, and no doubt beats any RAD solution hands-down for flexibility and speed of execution.

In my opinion, a RAD environment for GNOME should be based on Glade, or something very similar. Glade is a 
wonderful tool, great for anyone wanting to create their user interface quickly. It has many similarities 
with the interface design tools of RB and VB, and once you get your head around GTK's system of organizing 
how widgets fit together, it is pretty simple. Integrate that with a really good integrated development 
environment (IDE), and an easier language than C, and my idea is just about realized.

This project would probably not be as hard as it might look at first sight, since the free software community 
already has Glade, already has IDEs, and already has easier languages than C. And as you all know, since it 
is free software, it is available for a project such as this to integrate into its own solution.

It's a project which is just waiting to be started, and has enourmous potential to both attract novice 
developers to the GNOME project to develop even more great applications and help anyone to create their own 
software to meet their individual needs.

If anyone is remotely interested, I would love to hear from them, and I would very much appreciate help from 
anyone who shares my vision, since as a hobbyist I have no experience of undertaking a major project such as 
this.

Just think of the possibilities!

-- 
Thomas Kirby


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