From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,15267b2c375b45c2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-10-19 10:16:36 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!small1.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!border3.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!wn14feed!worldnet.att.net!204.127.198.203!attbi_feed3!attbi.com!rwcrnsc54.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3F92C6DB.5010502@comcast.net> From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Ada Component Registry proposal Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.34.139.183 X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-Trace: rwcrnsc54 1066583796 24.34.139.183 (Sun, 19 Oct 2003 17:16:36 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 17:16:36 GMT Organization: Comcast Online Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 17:16:36 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1146 Date: 2003-10-19T17:16:36+00:00 List-Id: I put together an XML DOCTYPE for a Ada Component Registry, and tried it out on GNADE. If a couple of people who understand XML would like to look at it and criticize, I'll send you a copy. But right now I consider it too preliminary to let loose in the wild. I'll probably have a much better worked out version by the end of next week. (Oops! Mental note to self, the registry itself needs a version number. ;-) I picked GNADE as a test case though, expecting it to be a decent stress test. Boy was it! For me as well as the XML grammer. I'd like to comment on a few things that I found and what they mean for a formal registry, or for the Common Ada Library. One of the things that the registry does is makes the zip or tar or whatever file that you can download more accessable. Much more accessable. Amazingly more accessable. GNADE as delivered has over a dozen directories and if you actually compile it, creates a few more. (And just to confuse you puts some stuff into existing directories outside the GNADE structure.) With the registry, you can look and see that most of the source files are children of GNU.DB, and that package declaration can be found in ../gnade-src-1.4.3a/support. The problem though can be found in that word most. There is also a separate OCI root for an Oracle binding, and over a dozen packages and programs at the library level that can conflict with other bindings. These include such wonderful names as Parser, Scanner, SQL, ODBC, and Tools. Am I saying that GNADE is horribly organized? No. Just that GNADE is a excellent example of why a registry is needed. If there were a standard place for a database interface packages--I would prefer Interfaces.Xxxxx, but that is a detail--then GNADE could provide some of those packages and mix and match with implementations of such packages from elsewhere. And GNU.DB.Support would disappear as GNADE moved to using more standard implementations of tables and lists. Finally, the scanner and parser that GNADE provides to support embedded SQL could be reused by other projects that have nothing to do with databases. But all of this has to be understood in terms of encouragement and process. GNADE is not going to adopt major changes just because I say they should. But the existance of a useable registry and "standard" Common Ada Library would encourage the GNADE authors to evolve their code in directions that will make it easier to reuse. -- Robert I. Eachus "Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along...the repair of an old motorcycle." -- from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig