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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: ObjectAda Professional GUI Builder
Date: 1996/10/18
Message-ID: <1996Oct17.215914.1@eisner>#1/1
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references: <01bbbc5d$ac75c3c0$629148a6@cornerstone.kee.aetc.af.mil>
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newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-18T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <01bbbc5d$ac75c3c0$629148a6@cornerstone.kee.aetc.af.mil>, "Frank C. Post" <postman@christcom.net> writes:

> My question is:  How does the GUI Bulder work?  I've searched the documents
> from start to finish, and though it's very descriptive concerning its
> abilities, it provides VERY LITTLE syntactical help.  What now?  Can anyone
> point me in the direction of additional references?  Or send me some sample
> code?

The first step is to have used something similar before :-).

Seriously, the one I had used extensively before was AppMaker on the
Macintosh, which has an entirely different approach to the design UI
but at least comes with documentation (Thomson, are you listening?).

I think the best approach to this sort of tool is to forget all about
Ada (or whatever the target language is) while doing the UI design.
AppMaker, in fact, has a single UI for doing Pascal, C, or either of
those languages using either of two common Macintosh object-oriented
"frameworks".

So with a copy of "Programming Windows 95" by Charles Petzold
at hand (to explain what "Multiple Document Interface" means,
if nothing else) one clicks and drags and sets "property" values
for graphic elements.  I had the advantage of having a strong idea
from the start of what windows were supposed to include what graphic
elements for the target interface.

When the UI design part is done (well, I can never resist "peeking"
in advance) you look at the generated code and behold a description
of your chosen GUI elements and their relationship to the GUI
system in your favorite language, Ada.

>From what I have seen so far, the ObjectAda GUI Builder does
less than AppMaker at generating typical code skeletons for an
application.  Then again, I often found that AppMaker's idea of
"typical" was not what I needed anyway.

But you said "sample code".  Perhaps you had already worked your way
through all of this and I am wasting bandwidth.

Larry Kilgallen
a Windows newcomer