Novell has begun a new element of a years-long effort to coax people away from Windows and toward Linux. It unveiled a Web site Friday that touts purported advantages that Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 has over Windows Vista. The site includes a white paper making the case, a variety of customers who have opted to use the software, and a video arguing that SLED has good usability and a built-in office suite but not Windows' lock-in and high licensing costs.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Can you elaborate? What functionality does Visual Basic have that the existing RAD tools (Lazarus, Kdevelop, GLADE, QTdesigner) cannot provide?
For a start, they need a language that lends itself to the purpose, like Visual Basic. Ruby is possibly the best candidate at the moment, and they need to be integrated into lots of desktop infrastructure.
Additionally, the infrastructure within the OS beyond the desktop needs to be fleshed out. For example, I can create a VB application using WMI (Windows Instrumentation) that can query the status of other machines, manipulate system services and I can create DCOM components that will give me the ability to do things programmatically, in a sane way, whether local or remote. The last point is where Linux does still lag way, way behind, regardless of what you can script. There's no substitute for having a good API for these things, especially for RAD development. I'd love to see some DBUS interfaces for this purpose, and it is possibly the only reason why I see something like Portland being useful.
Additionally, tools like Glade fall a long way short on quality, and to be honest, I don't know why Gnome doesn't just look more at Lazarus for RAD development instead of all that .Net hype which isn't materialising into anything.
Member since:2006-04-21
For a start, they need a language that lends itself to the purpose, like Visual Basic.
Well, I believe I can point you to plenty of people who would say that VB definitely does not lend itself to purpose.
Besides, there's always Gambas, which is almost a VB clone, I hear.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Qt Designer and KDevelop are indeed good extremely good, and probably the best options right now, but more work needs to be put into a good Visual Basic RAD replacement (since even Microsoft doesn't have one now - no VB.Net isn't it), like Ruby and make sure people can do stuff with it.
Can you elaborate? What functionality does Visual Basic have that the existing RAD tools (Lazarus, Kdevelop, GLADE, QTdesigner) cannot provide?
Edited 2007-01-20 19:27