Re: Migrating to Ada : a mini success story

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Simon Clubley wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> I would love to find an open source equivalent of the forms and ISAM
> toolkits which could be called from Ada.

For the forms toolkit, I'd start with TextTools[1]. It may not be
complete enough but certainly provides a starting point.

For ISAM, it depends on whether you need support for a specific binary
file format or if you are content with equivalent functionality.

If binary compatibility doesn't matter, I'd suggest writing an Ada
binding to Berkeley DB[2] or using the existing GNADE[3] binding to
SQLite[4]. The former is faster because it uses no SQL parser. The
latter is more structured, thanks to SQL. In both cases, the file
format will stand the test of time; that's the main benefit of free
software.

[1] http://www.pegasoft.ca/tt.html
[2] http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/berkeley-db/db/index.html
[3] http://gnade.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://sqlite.org/

(Berkeley DB, SQLite, GNADE and TextTools are all pre-packaged and
ready to use in Debian).

--
Ludovic Brenta.