GNAVI: Win32 bindings & ATL framework for Ada

GNAVI: Win32 bindings & ATL framework for Ada

[Dan'l Miller]

GNAVI is Ada for Windows development prior to Windows 8; GNAVI does not support Microsoft App Store apps via WinRT.  Does anyone know whether the authors of GNAVI intend to port GNAVI to WinRT, such as via WRT that does not utilize C++/CX (Microsoft's C++/CLI-like proprietary component extensions for "native"-machine-code C++)?  And the reason that I bring it up here:  would anyone currently outside of the GNAVI community be more interested in GNAVI if GNAVI kept pace with Microsoft's modern nonWin32 (but ATL-derived) direction in Windows 8, 8.1, and so forth?

Re: GNAVI: Win32 bindings & ATL framework for Ada

[Dan'l Miller]

On Sunday, June 29, 2014 9:47:54 AM UTC-5, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> GNAVI is Ada for Windows development prior to Windows 8

GNAVI is at http://gnavi.org and at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnavi

Re: GNAVI: Win32 bindings & ATL framework for Ada

[Dan'l Miller]

On Sunday, June 29, 2014 10:57:47 AM UTC-5, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> On Sunday, June 29, 2014 9:47:54 AM UTC-5, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> 
> > GNAVI is Ada for Windows development prior to Windows 8
> 
> GNAVI is at http://gnavi.org and at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnavi

As an intended competitor to Delphi with Ada being a 'better Pascal', GNAVI contains:
1) GNATCOM, which is an Ada framework for Microsoft's COM, DCOM, and ActiveX.  ActiveX is most similar to Windows 8 WinRT for store apps.
2) GWindows, which is an Ada framework for Win32.
3) an IDE written in Ada.

Re: GNAVI: Win32 bindings & ATL framework for Ada

[gautier_niouzes]

Le dimanche 29 juin 2014 16:47:54 UTC+2, Dan'l Miller a écrit :
> GNAVI is Ada for Windows development prior to Windows 8; GNAVI does not support Microsoft App Store apps via WinRT.

Did you have issues running software built with GWindows/GNAVI under Windows 8 or 8.1 ?
If so don't hesitate to share your experience. There is even a dedicated mailing list (gnavi-discuss).

Cheers
_________________________
Gautier's Ada programming
http://gautiersblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Ada
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Re: GNAVI: Win32 bindings & ATL framework for Ada

[Dan'l Miller]

On Monday, June 30, 2014 3:31:37 PM UTC-5, gautier...@hotmail.com wrote:
> Le dimanche 29 juin 2014 16:47:54 UTC+2, Dan'l Miller a écrit :
> 
> > GNAVI is Ada for Windows development prior to Windows 8; GNAVI does not support Microsoft App Store apps via WinRT.
> 
> 
> 
> Did you have issues running software built with GWindows/GNAVI under Windows 8 or 8.1 ?

I am evaluating whether GNAVI meets my needs.  It seems that GNAVI supports only Win32 (which is based on C API & ABI), not the new Windows Runtime (which is based on a derivative variant of COM).  It seems that GNATCOM's ActiveX design could be extended to support Windows Runtime's COM.

> If so don't hesitate to share your experience.

It seems that GNAVI's design has not yet been extended beyond Win32 to Windows Runtime (on either x86 or ARM).  [MinGW-64 is chipping away at the obstacles of running GCC 4.9 including GNAT on Windows 8.X for ARM.]  It seems possible that GNAVI's design could be extended to be, effectively, a port of Microsoft's WRL (the Windows Runtime Library for C++), but perhaps with 

> There is even a dedicated mailing list (gnavi-discuss).

Yes, I am aware of that; I am a (lurking) subscriber of gnavi-discuss.  Given that the archive of gnavi-discuss has been silent regarding Windows Runtime for store apps, I thought that I would broaden the audience here on comp.lang.ada to Ada people outside of Gnavi to see if additional interested parties would find Gnavi intriguing in either its Win32 incarnation now or expanding to support a WRL-reverse-engineered (and/or C++/CX inspired*) Ada-based binding to Windows Runtime so that Ada2012 could be utilized for developing "Modern/Metro" Windows Store apps instead of "desktop" Win32 executables.  My intent is dual-fold:
1) give GNAVI & GNATCOM as it is today some visibility in general;
2) stoke the fires of GNAVI & GNATCOM evolution for the future henceforth.

* inspired here = without the /CX C++/CLI-like oddball thick-binding syntax extensions for C++, but rather as standard-Ada-compliant nice thick binding instead of WRL's rough-shod intricacies & boilerplate idioms for C++.

Re: GNAVI: Win32 bindings & ATL framework for Ada

[David Botton]

Despite being the original author of the GNAVI project, I have not been active on it in many years, so I can voice an opinion about its direction to strongly unless I start getting more involved again. (I hope to at least clean up the gnavi website and adapower soon).

Nevertheless, my current solution to your issue has been to create HTML5 apps using AWS (or other Ada frameworks) with Ada code running local or remote. HTML5 apps can be added to the Win 8 or 8.1 desktop.