Android Basic Alternative

[Charlie]

If you code with Visual Basic, B4A is a good choice. However it's a bit too "object oriented" for my taste, so I'm looking for alternatives. I prefer good old procedural structures, like those used in PICBasic Pro, or Liberty Basic for the PC. I've been poking at RFO Basic which has the right language structure and the right price tag (it's open source, so free). It's available here: RFO Basic You actually can code on the target device, or you can create a file on your PC and move it over, and you can of course create APKs for distribution on Google Play. There are some tools available, but it's relatively new and a bit thin yet. There seems to be a very involved user community as well.

Has anybody else looked at this one?
How about other alternatives more akin to PBP than VB?

[mackrackit]

Have you been able to write anything useful with it?

[Charlie]

Sure - I've produced a display program for a PIC project that is basically collecting sensor data and sending it by BlueTooth. The Android app reads and displays the data, and saves me carrying a laptop for a task a phone can happily do. I have not hit any real limitations with the language other than my imagination. I did uncover a bug and got a load with a fix within a few hours, which is way better than I'd see with a proprietary product.

All the major constructs are there, and all the smart phone platform advantages are accessible like BlueTooth, WIFI, position/motion sensors, GPS, file reads and writes, etc. as well as graphics tools and text dislay tools, and there are tools to produce standalone apps for distribution in Google Play. I guess my only concern is the double edged sword of open source and GPL - you get lots of code to reuse, but you must publish your source so you might lose any competitive advantage. Perfect for a hobbyist, and still usable commercially with caution.

Not a lot of posts, though, so I'm guessing not a lot of PBP folks are using it - or maybe not even doing Android.

[Normnet]

Does RFO basic include the advanced feature of "Ad Hoc WiFi" or point to point WiFi?

Norm

[Charlie]

Hi Norm. I'm not sure - I have not played with WIFI yet. In general RFOB uses the android/java/linux existing infrastructure to set up physical or transport layer stuff, then uses sockets or defined buffer accesses to move data in and out of those layers. So if your version of Android supports PTP WIFI (I don't think my old 2.3.3 does) you should be able to use it. RFOB really wraps the existing Java and hides the complexity to get you going fast without a huge learning curve.

But I'm pretty much a newbie too... I'm just looking for something that doesn't require me to write a dozen pages of objects to type "hello World" on the screen. B4A is nice for a big collaborative projects, but I don't generally do any of those. RFOB might just serve all of my needs. The manual is quite good. I'm not sure about other language alternatives if they even exist, hence my original post.

[mackrackit]

Not a lot of posts, though, so I'm guessing not a lot of PBP folks are using it - or maybe not even doing Android.

From what I have seen I do not think that there are that many here working with Android.

I am going to try RFOB when I get time. Not sure when that will be though.

[rsocor01]

From what I have seen I do not think that there are that many here working with Android.

Well, I have been using Basic4Android for a while. Unlike Charlie, I do like the fact that the program is object oriented. I think that it been object oriented it makes my life much easier.

Robert

[spcw1234]

I also am using B4A, though only a few simple apps so far. Learning how to make your app work with different screen sizes has been my biggest hurdle. Still having trouble with that I will check out RFO basic. Thanks for the link.