SpiderBasic

I have recently discovered Purebasic (which is great) and saw some links to spiderbasic, which brought me to this site. I'm having a little trouble understanding the raison d'etre for Spiderbasic. It says on the home page:

Its main purpose is to allow development of very complex, windowed based web applications. It provides a large commandset to handle complex and reactive GUI, 2D games, and many more in a coherent manner.

Does this mean that it's not really suitable as a general replacement for Javascript, even though it generates javascript? For example, suppose I want to embed a calculator on a web page (maybe a very complex one). I would normally write this in pure Javascript. Can I use Spiderbasic instead? I'm not entirely sure what "windowed" applications are in the context of web pages.

Also, I've been looking at various ways of writing mobile apps (specifically for Android). I don't know Java (and I don't want to have to learn it), but it seems that you can write the code using javascript (see phonegap) so I was wondering whether spiderbasic could be used for this?

Thanks.

Yes you can do all that. Android and iOS support isn't available for now, but as you said there way to bring JS to native phone apps and we are currently working on it.

Thanks Fred, glad to hear you're working on the mobile platform.

Fred wrote:Yes you can do all that. Android and iOS support isn't available for now, but as you said there way to bring JS to native phone apps and we are currently working on it.

Hi Fred,

Could you elaborate a bit more on this? Will it be possible "in the near future" to create apps for mobile with SpiderBasic? I assume that this will be web apps wrapped in a native container; in other words that SpiderBasic will compile to something that can be submitted to the app stores?

Yes, it's the plan.

Supper ....

Great news !

How do you foresee it working, Fred?
Will we have to install ADK + Cordova + SpiderBasic and then configure them to work together?

I will try to integrate it as much as possible, don't worry.

rotaman wrote: For example, suppose I want to embed a calculator on a web page (maybe a very complex one). I would normally write this in pure Javascript. Can I use Spiderbasic instead? I'm not entirely sure what "windowed" applications are in the context of web pages.

Well Windowed means that SpiderBasic provides a Windows toolkit (based on dijit) along with other things.

The typical use case for SB is a single page application (SPA) web page.

Your calculator example is interesting: If you plan on writing the calculator in SB but you then want to embed this calculator in a web page unrelated to SB, you'll probably have to hack around a little in JS (Require.JS etc) and CSS to get it correct. I would not expect this to work out of the box easily without any "deploy job" type script. (Correct me if I'm wrong)