The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[David Botton]

I will be leaking out parts of the Gnoga business plan as I ready the website and it's applications:

The Gnoga project goals:

1. Advocate Ada for use in the "applications" space, in particular for non-safety critical, non-embedded general purpose software and business systems.

2. Generate a market for Ada software that allows individual developers and small teams to profit along with building large corporate interest and jobs.

3. Increase the grass root interest in Ada in the open source community and among hobbyists and students (outside the academic courses).

4. Materialize in a more practical and centralized fashion off the shelf reuse of Ada code.

5. Benefit anyone working on the GNAT compiler (including AdaCore) in order to help insure the continued high quality development of the Ada language and compilers that are free (as in Stallman) software and unencumbered Ada runtimes for public use.

David Botton

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[Hubert]

I hope it works out. I am beginning to see the benefits this could have 
for my own projects already.

One thing to consider is the documentation though. I know you already 
worked on tutorials. The usual Open Software piece on Source Forge is 
mostly useless unless you are already familiar with the concept of the 
software's problem domain or are familiar with similar software. The API 
entries are documented at all and if they are, they don't help much 
because having an API call documented and knowing how and when and why 
to use it are two different pairs of shoes.

Lack of documentation is really what puts off most people when it comes 
to Open Source software, I know it does for me. So my advice would be: 
Write, Write, Write! Also don't assume everybody knows about HTML5, CSS 
and whatnot (I know I don't, I never wrote a website, I never wrote 
anything in Java, I never even touched Java) so whatever knowledge from 
those fields is necessary, you should supply in documentation.

Usually people who ask for documentation in Open Source projects get the 
answer "well it's Open Source, you write documentation and publish it" 
so I don't even ask for it in most cases, but this project sounds 
ambitious enough that it would be a shame if it would fall behind simply 
because of bad documentation.



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Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[David Botton]

> One thing to consider is the documentation though.

Agreed, I've already started on a comprehensive user guide.

Also as the early adopters are using it, who do not know HTML/CSS well it is helping much for me to identify where to clarify areas in a way that is more familiar to Applications developers.

David Botton

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[Gour]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2014 18:12:28 -0800 (PST)
David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:

> Also as the early adopters are using it, who do not know HTML/CSS
> well it is helping much for me to identify where to clarify areas in
> a way that is more familiar to Applications developers.

Have you considered to subsriber mailing list to Gmane?

I'm an old-school guy preferring to follow mailing list via nntp instead
of fiddling with subscribing, sorting rules in order to not clutter my
Inbox etc.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
Even a man of knowledge acts according to his own nature, for 
everyone follows the nature he has acquired from the three modes. 
What can repression accomplish?

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[David Botton]

> Have you considered to subsriber mailing list to Gmane?

I sent the request

gmane.comp.lang.ada.gnoga

If and when they add it.

David Botton

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[David Botton]

> Have you considered to subsriber mailing list to Gmane?
> 
> I'm an old-school guy preferring to follow mailing list via nntp instead
> of fiddling with subscribing, sorting rules in order to not clutter my
> Inbox etc.

The list is now available on Gmane

http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ada.gnoga

You would still need to subscribe to the actual list to post.

The archives before that are at:

http://sourceforge.net/p/gnoga/mailman/?source=navbar

David Botton

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[Gour]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2014 21:28:13 -0800 (PST)
David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:

> You would still need to subscribe to the actual list to post.

Why?

That's one of the advantages of Gmane to avoid need for (un)subscribing
and beging able to join the list by simply one-time reply to their auth
message and leaving at any time by simply unsubscribing group in the
nntp reader.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
As a strong wind sweeps away a boat on the water, 
even one of the roaming senses on which the mind 
focuses can carry away a man's intelligence.

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[johannes falcone]

On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 6:46:56 AM UTC-8, David Botton wrote:
> I will be leaking out parts of the Gnoga business plan as I ready the website and it's applications:
> 
> The Gnoga project goals:
> 
> 1. Advocate Ada for use in the "applications" space, in particular for non-safety critical, non-embedded general purpose software and business systems.
> 
> 2. Generate a market for Ada software that allows individual developers and small teams to profit along with building large corporate interest and jobs.
> 
> 3. Increase the grass root interest in Ada in the open source community and among hobbyists and students (outside the academic courses).
> 
> 4. Materialize in a more practical and centralized fashion off the shelf reuse of Ada code.
> 
> 5. Benefit anyone working on the GNAT compiler (including AdaCore) in order to help insure the continued high quality development of the Ada language and compilers that are free (as in Stallman) software and unencumbered Ada runtimes for public use.
> 
> David Botton

awesome!!!!!
How does gnoga compare to 
www.happstack.com
http://zotonic.com/
http://www.seaside.st/
http://revel.github.io/
?

I assume ada kicks pythons ass speed wise (pypy too?)
The idea of letting ada worry about html and java script is sexy!

Can gnoga use www.hypertable.org as the data store? or must one use memcached and postgresql? Java is clumsy but they use cassandra to speeds things up.  Hypertable seems to be a free answer to cassandra.

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[David Botton]

On Thursday, November 13, 2014 1:35:13 PM UTC-5, johannes falcone wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 6:46:56 AM UTC-8, David Botton wrote:
> > I will be leaking out parts of the Gnoga business plan as I ready the website and it's applications:
> > 
> > The Gnoga project goals:
> > 
> > 1. Advocate Ada for use in the "applications" space, in particular for non-safety critical, non-embedded general purpose software and business systems.
> > 
> > 2. Generate a market for Ada software that allows individual developers and small teams to profit along with building large corporate interest and jobs.
> > 
> > 3. Increase the grass root interest in Ada in the open source community and among hobbyists and students (outside the academic courses).
> > 
> > 4. Materialize in a more practical and centralized fashion off the shelf reuse of Ada code.
> > 
> > 5. Benefit anyone working on the GNAT compiler (including AdaCore) in order to help insure the continued high quality development of the Ada language and compilers that are free (as in Stallman) software and unencumbered Ada runtimes for public use.
> > 
> > David Botton
> 
> awesome!!!!!
> How does gnoga compare to 
> www.happstack.com
> http://zotonic.com/
> http://www.seaside.st/
> http://revel.github.io/

Gnoga compares more to Gtk or Qt then to any of them. They are about "serving pages". Gnoga maintains a _live_ connection to the browser that it uses as a rendering engine for GUIs.

You write your company website using HTML and CSS, you write an interactive application in Gnoga for cloud/web, desktop or mobile.

It will take some time for people to fully "get" Gnoga.


The closest thing to Gnoga, but not exactly, is http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt or Xojo.com.

However, Wt is a dog to program in compared to Gnoga (and using C++.. nough said) and Xojo is a VB clone that was a desktop UI ported to this sort of thing.

I will have a full VB / Delphi like builder done in a few months hopefully.

> I assume ada kicks pythons ass speed wise (pypy too?)

Of course.

> The idea of letting ada worry about html and java script is sexy!

Ada is.

> Can gnoga use www.hypertable.org as the data store? or must one use memcached and postgresql? Java is clumsy but they use cassandra to speeds things up.  Hypertable seems to be a free answer to cassandra.

I'll take a look and let you know. Anything that you can interface with using JavaScript with or C/C++ can be used with Gnoga.

I don't have access to up to date GNATs for the JVM but in theory using Gnoga on that would mean anything that interfaces with JavaScript or on the JVM.

David Botton

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[johannes falcone]

On Thursday, November 13, 2014 3:27:16 PM UTC-5, David Botton wrote:
> On Thursday, November 13, 2014 1:35:13 PM UTC-5, johannes falcone wrote:
> > On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 6:46:56 AM UTC-8, David Botton wrote:
> > > I will be leaking out parts of the Gnoga business plan as I ready the website and it's applications:
> > > 
> > > The Gnoga project goals:
> > > 
> > > 1. Advocate Ada for use in the "applications" space, in particular for non-safety critical, non-embedded general purpose software and business systems.
> > > 
> > > 2. Generate a market for Ada software that allows individual developers and small teams to profit along with building large corporate interest and jobs.
> > > 
> > > 3. Increase the grass root interest in Ada in the open source community and among hobbyists and students (outside the academic courses).
> > > 
> > > 4. Materialize in a more practical and centralized fashion off the shelf reuse of Ada code.
> > > 
> > > 5. Benefit anyone working on the GNAT compiler (including AdaCore) in order to help insure the continued high quality development of the Ada language and compilers that are free (as in Stallman) software and unencumbered Ada runtimes for public use.
> > > 
> > > David Botton
> > 
> > awesome!!!!!
> > How does gnoga compare to 
> > www.happstack.com
> > http://zotonic.com/
> > http://www.seaside.st/
> > http://revel.github.io/
> 
> Gnoga compares more to Gtk or Qt then to any of them. They are about "serving pages". Gnoga maintains a _live_ connection to the browser that it uses as a rendering engine for GUIs.
> 
> You write your company website using HTML and CSS, you write an interactive application in Gnoga for cloud/web, desktop or mobile.
> 
> It will take some time for people to fully "get" Gnoga.
> 
> 
> The closest thing to Gnoga, but not exactly, is http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt or Xojo.com.
> 
> However, Wt is a dog to program in compared to Gnoga (and using C++.. nough said) and Xojo is a VB clone that was a desktop UI ported to this sort of thing.
> 
> I will have a full VB / Delphi like builder done in a few months hopefully.
> 
> > I assume ada kicks pythons ass speed wise (pypy too?)
> 
> Of course.
> 
> > The idea of letting ada worry about html and java script is sexy!
> 
> Ada is.
> 
> > Can gnoga use www.hypertable.org as the data store? or must one use memcached and postgresql? Java is clumsy but they use cassandra to speeds things up.  Hypertable seems to be a free answer to cassandra.
> 
> I'll take a look and let you know. Anything that you can interface with using JavaScript with or C/C++ can be used with Gnoga.
> 
> I don't have access to up to date GNATs for the JVM but in theory using Gnoga on that would mean anything that interfaces with JavaScript or on the JVM.
> 
> David Botton

It seems potentially very powerful.

Great work!!!

It seems that supply does create its own demand.

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[David Botton]

> It seems potentially very powerful.
> 
> Great work!!!
> 
> It seems that supply does create its own demand.

That's what makes for a "killer" App for advocacy ;)

Sort of like Rails for Ruby, etc.

There is a demand for Gnoga's style of "web app" development. It is far easier for programmers, especially IT types, to bridge from VB to Gnoga than from VB to JSF, Rails, Node.js, etc.

It is also just easier and more productive to write a "web app" as and actual application rather than a collection of servlets, xml configs, html templates, scaffolds and 300 other configuration details for a simple hello world app.

Even for websites, while not the main thrust of Gnoga, you can do great work with simple application "style" programming, here is an earlier demo of the upcoming Gnoga site (I'm actively working on it and the contents locally, I put this up just for comments on the Gnoga mail list)

http://www.gnoga.com:8888

When the site goes live I'll make the source code also available. It uses Gnoga and the binding to Bootstrap for the extra styling.

David Botton

Re: The Gnoga project goals - Ada Advocay for Businesses

[David Botton]

Here is a simple and interesting example of how Gnoga is different than say writing web pages with say Ajax in AWS alone without Gnoga.

Gnoga is "live" not passive and stateless.

This is a task type that could be used any place in your code at all. Using Ada tasks, this will strobe the color of any HTML element on a page:

   task type Color_Me_Task (O : Gnoga.Gui.Element.Pointer_To_Element_Class) is
      entry start;
      entry stop;
   end Color_Me_Task;
   -- Strobe color Element O

   task body Color_Me_Task is
      type Colors is (red, green, blue, orange, black);

      Current_Color : Colors := Colors'First;
   begin
      accept start;

      loop
         begin
            if O.Valid then
               O.Color (Current_Color'Img);

               if Current_Color = Colors'Last then
                  Current_Color := Colors'First;
               else
                  Current_Color := Colors'Succ (Current_Color);
               end if;
            end if;
         end;
         select
            accept stop;
            exit;
         or
            delay 0.1;
         end select;
      end loop;
   end Color_Me_Task;