Re: ANNOUNCE: GNAT Programming System

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

That would be nice, but may not be practical. Not all GUI builders work 
the same & if you wanted a tightly integrated product (something where 
the GUI builder isn't just fired off as a separate process - what's the 
point? I could have done that without GPS.) it probably wouldn't be 
possible without picking which (of a very few available anyway) GUI 
builder to support.

GtkAda uses an XML based "database" that ought to be integrated into the 
  GPS "project". It also uses some code generation directories for 
preserving hand-mods and such that would need to be considered as to how 
to integrate it. You'd want GPS to display and access all the different 
window components one might build much as it already does access Ada 
packages. If you don't get this sort of tight integration, you might 
just as well not bother. You can always get some other product, run it 
stand-alone and manage the artifacts yourself. I'd think that for GPS to 
try to leave the door open for any/all other possible GUI builders, it 
would have to reduce itself to simply invoking some subprocess. What's 
the point of that? I could already double-click on an icon on my desktop 
- moving it to an icon in GPS doesn't help much.

Its a standard problem in engineering. Either you try to stay general 
enough that all the options are open - in which case, you don't do much 
- or you bite the bullet, get to a specific implementation and run with 
it, thus closing off other options.

MDC

Fionn mac Cuimhaill wrote:
> 
> 
> I would like to see GUI builder support added in such away that GUI
> builders could be put in as some kind of loadable module, so that
> there could be a choice of several.


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Marin David Condic
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