Meeting Benoît Minisini at FOSDEM

February, 26th & 27th I traveled to FOSDEM.

There I could listen to very interesting speeches and contact personally with some of the people who we want to collaborate with in LinEx. Thinking of the migration of the ministries of my regional government, and because of its possible use in education replacing the famous-used-overbloated V. Basic, Gambas is one of the most interesting projects. I had the chance to be there with Daniel Campos, Spanish developer who did the net, xml, compress and gtk components for Gambas. There we had the great pleasure of meeting Gambas’ author: Benoît Minisini.

We were talking for a couple of hours, speaking about different topics, some of them more important for us in Spain, some others really interesting that gave us an idea about where Gambas developing is going to. Most important topics were:

• Study how to split source code to allow components compilation out from the gambas source code tree. This is a very important feature to continue maintaining reasonably gambas binary packages in Debian (I suppose in other distros too). It also would help debugging components as a separate entity, and avoid needing to compile all the gambas stuff (45’ minutes in a powerful PC) whenever a make clean is executed or move from a computer to another. Benoît told us he would study if such thing is possible, making clear that any component added to the official gambas core would be checked by him. We are going to prepare a gambas-dev package with the includes and library needed and test it.
• We showed to Benoît the wonderful gbgrid component Daniel Campos has coded. Some possibilities to make it compatible with gtk and qt simultaneously were studied. Benoît suggested some useful ideas about its source code.
• We suggested him the idea of making a D-BUS component to communicate gambas application themselves and with other Gnome apps. If KDE finally gets totally freedesktop.org compliant, that component would become the communication standard way between applications for both desktops managers.
• Daniel also commented his resolution of making a gb-gtk-gconf component for accessing gconf in Gnome.
• Daniel and Benoît spoke about changing the actual Result object, which is static to make it able to answer to adding and updating records. If it can not be done accessing the API database, maybe it could be done keeping a table with the deleted records and a buffer with updates and addings.
• Benoît told us that one of his main priorities is making gambas components using gambas, without needing C for it.
• He also explained us the idea of making a gb.form class. Qt & gtk forms should inherit from it. That would clear the way to make web-forms in gambas later.
• We spent also a lot of time talking about the ideas that Benoît & Daniel had about the possibility of using Gambas as a web development platform. The easiest taking off could be exporting gb.form to HTML + CSS. Then, if XForms becomes standard that would be the way to follow.