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From: pontius@btv.ibm.com (Dale Pontius)
Subject: Re: Ada Foundation Classes
Date: 1996/07/31
Message-ID: <4to243$gjo@mdnews.btv.ibm.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 171666214
references: <31FE15A6.53A@comm.hq.af.mil>
to: Chad Bremmon <chad.bremmon@comm.hq.af.mil>
organization: IBM Microelectronics Division
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-07-31T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <31FE15A6.53A@comm.hq.af.mil>,
        Chad Bremmon <chad.bremmon@comm.hq.af.mil> writes:
>
>I would like to get started on some work with
>Portable Ada Foundation Classes.  If any of you
>have looked at the WWW site, you know it hasn't
>been updated for a while.
>
The name Ada Foundation Class kind of smacks of Microsoft
Foundation Class. There are a couple of points about this...

You say 'like MFC, but portable', and obviously C++ instead
of Ada is implied. Things like CORBA (more portable than COM)
take you a bit further from MFC.

I would suggest that you at least glance at some other class
libraries, as well. The first two that come to mind are Fresco
and OpenClass (IBM), but there are others as well. There are
different styles involved. Before going too far on such a
project I'd look at some of the different styles (not products)
and see just which one maps most gracefully into Ada.

I don't mean to sound like an IBM add, but I've heard from
people who have used MFC and moved to OpenClass that they like
the OpenClass style better. To be fair, I've also heard from
people saying OpenClass was slow and buggy. To continue fairness,
I've heard the same said of MFC, and that Fresco is a resource
hog.

Please, just look, and don't start blindly.

Oh yeah, to answer question 1.5...
The Ada library does a lot of basics, so let's concentrate on
what is missing:
  GUI
  Networking
  Corba (How about Ada OpenDoc wrappers?)
I'm sure there's more, these shout out to me.

Dale Pontius
(NOT speaking for IBM)