Re: GUI toolkit for Ada again

[Gary Scott <scottg@flash.net>]

Hi,

Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> 
> In article <3B43CC4E.887F3AE6@flash.net>, Gary Scott <scottg@flash.net> writes:
> > Hi,
> > There are several commercial GUI toolkits that do quite a good job of
> > adapting to the specific OS to achieve native "look and feel".  See
> >
> > http://www.gino-graphics.com
> > http://www.winteracter.com
> 
> Thanks for the pointers.  Those both seem to be Fortran-centric.
> Not that such is bad, but I was wondering if it is because that
> happens to be the area for which you were familiar with products
> or if there is some natural tendency of Fortran programmers to
> provide more of a market for this sort of product.

There is also a C-based API for GINO.  Either API should be quite easy
to call from Ada.  Link compatibility with MS VC is all that is required
(there may be other C compilers supported as well).  I merely
recommended these because they are both very good at what they do (not
perfect, obviously, but all the basic stuff is there and extremely easy
to use).  Fortran programmers do tend to value portability, but have not
historically worried that much about user interface.  Many of those that
do worry about user interface, want that to be portable as well.  These
products are tailored to the need.  I build a lot of small tools and had
began to find that engineers were more and more reluctant to use my
tools because they didn't have a GUI (fresh out of college, didn't know
what a command line was).  GINO makes it extremely easy to add a GUI to
plain old console apps (did I say extremely easy?).

> 
> Both products seem to handle Microsoft and Motif.  Since Motif
> was designed to look like (one generation of) Microsoft, that
> may be an easier set of two to cover.  It would be interesting
> to see if there is anything that covers both of those plus OS/2,
> MacOS and MacOS X (NEXT-derivative).


-- 

Gary Scott
mailto:scottg@flash.net

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