Re: ANN: Introducing AdaBase - Thick database bindings for Ada

[brbarkstrom@gmail.com]

I find myself using p_Access_Variable_Type to indicate pointers, although the result is probably not quite in accord with standard Ada naming conventions.  However, if you look back, Ada95 authors often used upper case for key words in Ada (like IF, ELSE, and so on).  I've been working on tutorials that deal with Ada concurrency and find the earliest example files need extensive editing to get them to the point where I can understand them when I put them into the Ada2012 Windows XP version.  On the other hand, I've also been dealing with another set of tutorials where the editing is minimal.

Probably the key point is to recognize that you're dealing with a variety of sociological groupings that have different ways of naming things.  If you want
some light, but (maybe) interesting reading, try Eco, U.: Kant and the Platypus
that deals with how communities of discourse develop a community dialect that
lets the members talk about common experiences.  You might even want to try
figuring out which communities you're dealing with in the Thick Ada Binding
and see which ones have different conventions.  If you do that, you might want
to look up Thomas: Strategic Product Development.  It's a book that shows how
to lay out a marketing strategy that deals with user needs (and user desires).
It's really a classic book on marketing and has a very helpful list of 
procedures for how to do that work.

If you want to do this for commercial purposes, it's the first step in the
development of a marketing plan.  There is, as I recall, an Ada Web Server
project that used databases and promised a complete developed Ada Web Site.
You might look at https://github.com/stcarrez/ada-awa.  Ada-awa was intended
to be a complete Ada Web site took kit that included Ada tools that accessed
databases.  I haven't dug deep enough to check out how its doing now, but
it might be a useful site to take a look at.  The usual problem is that someone
gets interested in doing a project, has enough resources to get something
working, and then moves on to something that pays them enough to get started
on some new project.

The isaviz project (at https://www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz/) is a reasonable
cautionary note.  It looked like a good start, got W3C approval, and then
was abandoned by its developer when he found something else that paid better.
Track through all the libraries it refers to (like graphviz - hosted by ATT,
and Jena - hosted by HP and then sent on to Apache).  If you wanted to 
reconstruct it now, you've got quite a bunch of threads to pick up and
recreate or harmonize).

I guess it's a fact of life that you arrange for someone to pick up on the
initial development and continue to support it for the life of the entire
project future.

Bruce B.