Re: portable GUI , Ada backend, best design?

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei@online.no>]

nma123@super.zippo.com wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am seeking advice on this.
> 
> I'd like to do this:
> 
>       +-----------+     +--------------------+
>       | GUI       |     | analysis           |
>       | for data  |<===>| and                |
>       | entry     |     | computational part |
>       +-----------+     +--------------------+
> 
> Where the software must be portable with no code changes when building the
> software on UNIX and Windows.
> 
> I looking at using  Ada (GNAT) for the analysis and computational part
> of the system, using Ada insures portability for the backend side.
> 
> The problem is what to use for the GUI part. the GUI part is for entering
> user input, the parameters for the analysis part, so it is not very advanced
> GUI, but it had to be portable.
> 
[snipped]
> I can may be use Java for the GUI and use JNI to interface to C code that
> calls Ada, the Ada calling C back that calls Java to update the GUI.
> 
> offcourse I can use X and Ada but that is not portable.
> 
> Any other ideas? how to do portable GUI that interfaces to Ada?
> 
> thanks,
> n.
>

You can use the ms-dos window. It is more or less compatible with a
vt100.

If the GUI is not very advanced it might be useful to do it as a one-off
in Visual Basic and use RPC to communicate with the computational
program. You could perhaps use GNAT or Aonix to code the communications.

For Unix you could probably do someting in TK/TCL and Ada. Perhaps still
using RPC to get commonality with the Windows version.

A third option would involve using a web browser as the user-inteface.
You could either use java (in Ada) for the user interface or run the
application as a cgi-bin program.

Greetings,

-- 
// Tarjei T. Jensen 
//    tarjei@online.no || voice +47 51 62 85 58
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