Re: An Ada IDE and discussions

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com>]

"Beard, Frank" wrote:
> I was browsing around the Aonix Web site
> (http://www.aonix.com/content/index.html)
> and clicked on the Product button at the top of the screen.
> I just happened to look at TeleUSE.  It is supposed to be a
> high powered GUI/Development tool for Unix.  I noticed a new
> product TeleUSE/Windows.  The product now claims you can do
> development on either platform and run on the other. I quote
...snip...
> I know you can't really go by what a vendor says, but if it's
> half as good as they claim, why don't they advertise it more,
> or at least speak up on this list.
> 
> Has anyone used this product?
> Does it run on Linux?
> 
> Frank

Linux? Dunno..

We looked at it briefly. We were looking for a rapid X-Window
development package, and for this, it didn't seem to make the
grade for us. I am convinced that if you become well-versed in
their product, including their "D" language, it might work well.

However, if you have the situation where your developers are
not using the product daily/weekly, and/or they're not quick
on the technical uptake, you won't find it's use "rapid". It
does purport to support the "whole development life cycle", 
which may justify the "extra effort". For us, quick and _easy_
development was more important, since for maintenance, we rarely
make big changes to the screens after the fact. What I found with
my initial trials was that I could have coded the darn thing by
hand faster (at least for smaller screens).

What I also found was that when I got it to generate code, I often
ended up choosing names that conflicted with "something else",
and so it would seldom work for me the first time (there would
be conflicts in their "D" language with either other objects or
keywords). This would be OK, but there was never any errors or
warnings -- just the compiled code would not work.
After much investigation, you could eventually make 
it work -- but this defeated the "quick development time" that 
we were looking for.

We ended up going for X-Designer, which was much easier to
learn (you might be able to use it without documentation). It
did not require proprietary widget libraries either. THe downsides
are that it has fewer widgets to choose from (but you can add to
the selection), and it does not try to address the full "development
life cycle". 

X-Designer is available for Linux, and I think it
can support Ada if you use some downloadable perl script to do
some script-magic.

FWIW, Warren.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg