New Liberty BASIC Projects Area

I've created a new area on the Liberty BASIC Community Forum over at Proboards here:

    http://libertybasiccom.proboards.com/board/20/community-projects

Here is copy from a post I made there about the purpose of the board:

I created this area of the board for a specific reason.  I want to create libraries free code for specific purposes and also some programs for the specific purpose of promoting Liberty BASIC.

So, for example:

• A game framework and some examples. Side scrolling games, platform games, etc., with sprites, sound effects, background music that can use the keyboard, mouse, or joystick. etc.
• A business application including forms, an ODBC database, printed output (tables, forms, bar charts, histograms)
• A graphical editor - a mini CAD program or similar
• Hardware interfacing - a monitor program for experimenting with serial devices

Suggestions welcome.  Is there any particular thing you know how to do well, or that you would like to be able to do in Liberty BASIC?  Let's make these things into actual reusable code  that people can use, and that can be included with Liberty BASIC.

I will also blog here about these projects as they progress.

Run BASIC - Zero Configuration Web Application Server

I found a blog post today that compared PHP with Ruby on Rails in terms of how much easier PHP is to install and configure than Ruby on Rails. Both of these systems are composed of at a minimum:

• A web server (usually Apache)
• A language interpreter for PHP or Ruby
• And usually a database server

And this is a simplification. The user needs to install and configure these things which requires knowing about a lot of esoteric stuff. If you've never done this before, you can lose some of your hair. Unless you like pain, why put yourself through this?

If you want to create your own web applications, Run BASIC will install everything ready to run in one shot. http://www.runbasic.com/

Why do people put up with complex programming systems? Because for more than a decade they had much harder tools, so now they think PHP and RoR are easy.

Database and web capabilities

Our Run BASIC + SQLite integration is coming along nicely, and it lays the groundwork for using other databases later on (Oracle, SQL Server, MySql, etc.). One thing that we did to make using databases handy is that we built in some display technologies. You can query the database and then just use the RENDER statement to put the result on the web page. You can also inject some CSS styling right into that result, and you can even turn the line items of any column in the displayed table into links.

We also have added an httpget$() function so you can use HTTP to retrieve web documents like web pages, RSS feeds, etc. We plan to include an XML parser, and if we can come up with an easy to use way to stream through an HTML document we will provide that also.

These capabilities (except for the table rendering) will also be included in Liberty BASIC v5.0.

To keep up with what we're doing with Run BASIC, make sure to visit this blog and also http://libertybasic.conforums.com/index.cgi?board=runbasic