Announce: JEWL

Announce: JEWL

[John English]

JEWL (John English's Window Library) is a set of Ada packages
designed to enable novices to develop GUI-based applications for
MS Windows. Students are often frustrated by the fact that the Ada
standard libraries only provide text-based I/O facilities; they
want to develop modern-looking programs with a GUI, and complain
about learning Ada rather than VB or Java as a result. JEWL is
intended as a remedy for this.

Existing bindings to Windows are intended for production use rather
than educational use, and as such they are designed to be complete,
flexible and efficient. A side effect of this is that the learning
curve is too steep to use these packages with beginners. JEWL is
deliberately designed NOT to be complete or particularly flexible
but rather to be easy to learn and to use from the "Hello world"
stage onwards. This will hopefully make learning Ada a bit more
exciting for students.

There are two primary packages: JEWL.IO is a replacement for Text_IO
which uses GUI dialog boxes for input and echoes all input to the
standard output; JEWL.Windows is the main GUI package (and all the
JEWL.IO dialogs are built using the facilities in this package).
The approach taken is that most controls (editboxes, checkboxes,
listboxes and so on) are interactive visual representations of
string and Boolean variables (or arrays thereof) and that other
controls (buttons, menu items) generate scalar command codes,
making programs similar in structure to ones which use a menu
driven text interface (a loop which gets user choices and then
acts on them).

Example programs included with the distribution include a simple
sketchpad, a basic text editor and a calculator. The distribution
is under the terms of the GNU GPL and has been tested with GNAT
for Windows 95/NT. It should work with ObjectAda as well, but I
haven't been able to confirm this.

Documentation is online at http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je/jewl/
and the source distribution (which includes the documentation and
examples) is at ftp://ftp.bton.ac.uk/pub/je/jewl-11.zip. Although
the current implementation is for Windows, there is nothing platform
specific in the package specifications. If anyone fancies porting
it to the Mac (or, as Mike Feldman suggested, the AWT for use with
JGNAT), just let me know... ;-)

The source code may also be of interest to readers of this group,
as it uses features discussed here recently: private packages,
tagged types, tasks and protected types, controlled types,
reference counted objects, and so on.

Your comments are welcomed!

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 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
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 University of Brighton    |    -- see http://burks.bton.ac.uk
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Re: Announce: JEWL

[Pascal Obry]

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John English a �crit dans le message <38F35567.89A360DF@brighton.ac.uk>...
>JEWL (John English's Window Library) is a set of Ada packages
>designed to enable novices to develop GUI-based applications for
>MS Windows. Students are often frustrated by the fact that the Ada
>standard libraries only provide text-based I/O facilities; they
>want to develop modern-looking programs with a GUI, and complain
>about learning Ada rather than VB or Java as a result. JEWL is
>intended as a remedy for this.


Very nice work here. This is definitly what student want. I've always
had comment like: "Well in VB I can do very easily simple GUI how to
do that in Ada"... And from there you see my answer "Well, that is
not easy and we wont have time to explore this..."

Pascal.

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