Re: GUI with Ada?

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

Nasser M. Abbasi wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> Hello;
>
> I have not kept up with Ada for sometime. I was wondering, if someone wants
> to develop a simple GUI (plots, menus, buttons, graphs, etc..) using Ada,
> and have the code compile to a .exe on windows and linux, which is the
> current most popular software pieces needed for the GUI?
>
> Assuming I will be using GNAT. Which gcc version should I be using these
> days which has the latest Ada support in it? Should I be using gcc directly
> for Ada programming these days, or use GNAT GPL 2009 version from Libre web
> sitehttp://libre.adacore.com/libre/?
>
> I know there are few choices for the GUI, and just wanted to check what is
> the "best" choice do you think for that.  One with a GUI builder would be
> nice (i.e. where one can pick the components and lay them out to design the
> interface). This will be an school program, nothing commercial. I wanted to
> try to write some basic finite element code in Ada, but need a GUI part for
> the simulation part.

Shameless_Plug: begin
Besides the respective merits of GTK+, Qt and their Ada bindings, you
may find that ease of installation and deployment are also of
importance.  By that metric, I suggest you take a look at Debian GNU/
Linux 5.0 "Lenny", the stable distribution.  It ships GCC 4.3 and
GtkAda 2.8.1 as packages, i.e. precompiled and preconfigured for
immediate use, along with a host of other Ada libraries.  Beware
though: you may get spoiled with the ease of use and never want to go
back to Windows :)  The installation is as easy as:

aptitude install libgtkada2-dev

which will also pull the correct version of GCC and any other packages
necessary.

If you feel adventurous, you may want to try the testing distribution;
it has GtkAda 2.12.0.  I am planning to upload GtkAda 2.14.2 to
unstable in the next couple of weeks; it should reach testing by the
end of January.
end Shameless_Plug;

--
Ludovic Brenta.