Re: Choose Ada flyer (and future of ADA)

["news.oxy.com" <Vladimir_Olensky@oxy.com>]

David Botton wrote in message <01be47f7$a9740600$0a18b70a@DBHP>...
>Are you ready to contribute to a GPL project that will make an Ada95 Delphi
>like environment a reality?


David,
Thanks for invitation.

Though I am not a professional full time programmer (I am telecommunications
engineer and program only occasionally when I need something for my needs)
may be I will be able to help in something.
I had a look at your (http://www.botton.com/) . It is very interesting and
useful.

I definitely want Ada 95 Delphi like environments to become a reality.
It may happen if there will be group of people like you , Jerry van Dijk,
Murkus Kuhn and others with great experience in Ada so that this group could
be the engine of such project.
My first association is the successful NASM (Netwide Assembler ) project
(http://www.web-sites.co.uk/nasm/) that grew out of an idea on
comp.lang.asm.x86 or alt.lang.asm , which was essentially that there didn't
seem to be a good free x86-series assembler around, and that maybe someone
ought to write one.

You wrote:
>Even if you can not contribute time to code, write documentation, design
>icons, etc. Maybe you can help by adding your ideas and answers to
>questions like:
>What features would you like to see in a product like this?
>What products already exist that could be integrated with this?
>What is your dream IDE?
>How could we get companies to contribute hardware, compilers, bindings,
>etc. to get this done quicker and cheaper?

1. First of all to start a separate thread " Ada free RAD tools development"
so that all posts regarding that issue would be concentrated in one place
and would not be scattered around comp.lang.ada. This will help to gather
all the interested people and all their ideas together.

2. It probably should closely follow Delphi appearance and it's open for 3d
party components design.
To me the all the experience, ideas, concepts and spirit of Delphi
(www.inprise.com/delphi) can be analyzed and used in that project.
There is nothing wrong with it. (e.g. Aonix with their OA is following very
close MS Developer Studio and this is fine as it helps people quickly get
used to it ).

3. To try to find some sponsors.
May be it even will be possible to get Inprise interested in that project
and to sponsor it to some extent (it may became commercial in that case).

4. GNAT and GLADE should be considered as a free software platform to build
that Ada RAD toolkit. AdaGIDE may be used as code editor window.

5. CLAW from RR Software
 http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/claw/claw.htm ) may be considered as
initial start point.
May be RR Software will be interested to take part in that so that later to
be able to add new features to CLAW. There may be the same policy as with
the GNAT - new releases are commercially supported, previous ones are
publicly available.
Also may be it is worth to consider idea of creating some sort of  Teleuse
from Aonix or Modula-3 FormsVBT as top-level platform independent GUI
builder above CLAW for WinNT and some high OO bindings to X-windows.

6. GRASP (http://www.eng.auburn.edu/department/cse/research/grasp/) is very
nice thing (especially their CSD that does a great job analyzing code
structure. Even Delphi does not have that feature). May be experience of
GRASP development could be used.

7. Some useful freeware components that could come with Ada RAD toolkit.
7.1. Booch OO component library.
7.2. Bindings to free Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) C++ toolkit.
(http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html) .
Very impressive.  Just look at  the sponsors and users list
May be it can even be totally rewritten in Ada 95.

8. I can try to use my 15 years son to create some icons and do some future
system test to see how it is "end-user" friendly.
He always asks me to give him some time to work with the computer.


Thanks and regards,
Vladimir Olensky
(vladimir_olensky@yahoo.com)
(Vladimir_Olensky@oxy.com)
Telecommunication specialist,
Occidental C.I.S. Service, Inc. ( www.oxy.com )
Moscow,
Russia.