Re: Java portability (was: An Ada IDE and discussions)

[Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com>]

nicolas wrote:

> "Marc A. Criley" <mcqada@earthlink.net> a �crit dans le message news:
> 3B5DCE74.C12AA2D8@earthlink.net...
> > nicolas wrote:
> >
> > Though I would doubt that _Ada_ Core Technologies would drop Ada any
> > time in the near future :-)
>
> I doubt it too ...
> Unfortunately, at least in Windows world, this is the only one company for
> which you can be quite certain about that.

I am currently advisor on a project that will be presented at this year's
SigAda which has been written in GtkAda.   I originally suggested the
developers
consider CLAW, but they decided they wanted platform independence.  That
is, they want their application to run on Wintel, Linux, or any variation
of Unix or anything else they could name.

The result of their effort is quite good.  Not only have they achieved the
desired
level of portability, one of them told me last week they would not have been
able to accomplish the same quality had they limited themselves to Java.  As
it
stands now, their source code compiles, unchanged, on an NT machine or a
Linux machine and runs exactly the same on both.   This has impressed one of
our colleagues who originally intended to use JGNAT to the point that he has
decided to explore the potential of GtkAda instead.

I would be nice if there were a version of GtkAda for Windows CE or the
Palm OS, but that is probably a long way off since we don't have Ada compilers

for those operating systems either.

Richard Riehle
AdaWorks Software Engineering
richard@adaworks.com