Portable GUI in ADA ?

Portable GUI in ADA ?

[Jos De Laender]

    Gentlemen,

    I was looking for nearly free Gui (with some elementary Gui building
assistance) in Ada95. Portability between Windows and Motif is also a
concern.

    This very group helped me with some pointers , but finally my quest
ended with Tash+Rapid as the only candidate. It seems however a very
indirect approach to me (needing a tcl/tk interpreter to which ada hooks
in then) and my _feeling_ (sorry for that ;-) ) is that it is not a nice
and clean approach.

    I was wondering if something like wxWindows (C/C++) could not be
ported or bound somehow to Ada95 ? Maybe it is not the cleanest program
around neither, but it gives at least the possibility to produce
standalone programs. Did someone try this already ? Would it be worth
the effort ?

    All comments, including those to correct my feeling ;-) , are
welcome.

    Best regards,

    Jos (only speaking for himself, not for his company)

Re: Portable GUI in ADA ?

[Peter Milliken]

Well, if Tash and Tcl/Tk don't strike your fancy by all means try
wxWindows(?) you can "bind" Ada95 to any other language, especially C and
C++. You'll just have to create your own bindings to the GUI (which is
exactly what Tash does for Tcl/Tk, so this will give you an idea of the
amount of work involved :-)).

There are tools in the Tcl/Tk world that produce stand-a-lone executables,
have you thought about calling your Ada code from within Tcl/Tk and then
using one of these "compilers" to generate the executable? I have never done
it but it shouldn't be too hard given that Tcl/Tk is meant to be extended by
the use of C, which means Ada95 can be used as well. Have a close read of
the LRM and GNAT documentation and you will see how Ada95 interfaces to
other languages. Then search dejanews for articles in the Ada newsgroup on
interfacing to C++ (name mangling in C++ seems to cause problems, I have
never tried it myself).

Personally I think persevering with the Tcl/Tk route is better, at least
Tash provides a set of thick/thin bindings as a good starting point.

Peter

Jos De Laender wrote:

>     Gentlemen,
>
>     I was looking for nearly free Gui (with some elementary Gui building
> assistance) in Ada95. Portability between Windows and Motif is also a
> concern.
>
>     This very group helped me with some pointers , but finally my quest
> ended with Tash+Rapid as the only candidate. It seems however a very
> indirect approach to me (needing a tcl/tk interpreter to which ada hooks
> in then) and my _feeling_ (sorry for that ;-) ) is that it is not a nice
> and clean approach.
>
>     I was wondering if something like wxWindows (C/C++) could not be
> ported or bound somehow to Ada95 ? Maybe it is not the cleanest program
> around neither, but it gives at least the possibility to produce
> standalone programs. Did someone try this already ? Would it be worth
> the effort ?
>
>     All comments, including those to correct my feeling ;-) , are
> welcome.
>
>     Best regards,
>
>     Jos (only speaking for himself, not for his company)

Re: Portable GUI in ADA ?

[David Botton]

What about GTKAda?
http://ada.eu.org/gtkada/

David Botton

Jos De Laender wrote in message <3771F6D3.83F3C540@alcatel.be>...

>    This very group helped me with some pointers , but finally my quest
>ended with Tash+Rapid as the only candidate.

Re: Portable GUI in ADA ?

[Jos De Laender]

    Hi ,

thanks , for remembering me once more.

Initially I skipped , due to being in Beta for Windows. But some
experimenting learns me that it is very reliable already.

The package seems to be very structured  and extensible. Documentation could
maybe be improved , but is workable. In the beginning I found it a bit
strange that the basic 'widgets' are not mapped to the OS equivalent, but
apparently drawn from scratch. But all common widgets seem present and
working very good.

I'm going with that one !

Thanks once more,

Jos De Laender

P.S. : Does somebody know how I get rid of the dos-window that comes up
along with the graphical  application under Windows ?


David Botton wrote:

> What about GTKAda?
> http://ada.eu.org/gtkada/
>
> David Botton
>
> Jos De Laender wrote in message <3771F6D3.83F3C540@alcatel.be>...
>
> >    This very group helped me with some pointers , but finally my quest
> >ended with Tash+Rapid as the only candidate.

Re: Portable GUI in ADA ?

[Martin C. Carlisle]

In article <3778B552.DB7792E7@alcatel.be>,
Jos De Laender  <jos.de_laender@alcatel.be> wrote:
>P.S. : Does somebody know how I get rid of the dos-window that comes up
>along with the graphical  application under Windows ?

Use the -mwindows linker option in GNAT.  For Aonix, it is also possible
to specify this in the project, but I don't recall how.

--Martin

-- 
Martin C. Carlisle, Asst Prof of Computer Science, US Air Force Academy
carlislem@acm.org, http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfcs/bios/carlisle.html
DISCLAIMER:  This content in no way reflects the opinions, standards or 
policy of the US Air Force Academy or the United States Government.

Re: Portable GUI in ADA ?

[Paul Hussein]

How about using Java for GUI and Ada95. There is a good tool here to help
you connect
http://www.ainslie-software.com/

 ADAJNI

Peter Milliken <peter.milliken@boeing.com> wrote in message
news:3772A63C.E3DD1C2F@boeing.com...
> Well, if Tash and Tcl/Tk don't strike your fancy by all means try
> wxWindows(?) you can "bind" Ada95 to any other language, especially C and
> C++. You'll just have to create your own bindings to the GUI (which is
> exactly what Tash does for Tcl/Tk, so this will give you an idea of the
> amount of work involved :-)).
>
> There are tools in the Tcl/Tk world that produce stand-a-lone executables,
> have you thought about calling your Ada code from within Tcl/Tk and then
> using one of these "compilers" to generate the executable? I have never
done
> it but it shouldn't be too hard given that Tcl/Tk is meant to be extended
by
> the use of C, which means Ada95 can be used as well. Have a close read of
> the LRM and GNAT documentation and you will see how Ada95 interfaces to
> other languages. Then search dejanews for articles in the Ada newsgroup on
> interfacing to C++ (name mangling in C++ seems to cause problems, I have
> never tried it myself).
>
> Personally I think persevering with the Tcl/Tk route is better, at least
> Tash provides a set of thick/thin bindings as a good starting point.
>
> Peter
>
> Jos De Laender wrote:
>
> >     Gentlemen,
> >
> >     I was looking for nearly free Gui (with some elementary Gui building
> > assistance) in Ada95. Portability between Windows and Motif is also a
> > concern.
> >
> >     This very group helped me with some pointers , but finally my quest
> > ended with Tash+Rapid as the only candidate. It seems however a very
> > indirect approach to me (needing a tcl/tk interpreter to which ada hooks
> > in then) and my _feeling_ (sorry for that ;-) ) is that it is not a nice
> > and clean approach.
> >
> >     I was wondering if something like wxWindows (C/C++) could not be
> > ported or bound somehow to Ada95 ? Maybe it is not the cleanest program
> > around neither, but it gives at least the possibility to produce
> > standalone programs. Did someone try this already ? Would it be worth
> > the effort ?
> >
> >     All comments, including those to correct my feeling ;-) , are
> > welcome.
> >
> >     Best regards,
> >
> >     Jos (only speaking for himself, not for his company)
>

Re: Portable GUI in ADA ?

[Ed Falis]

In article <7lgjpj$1b4$1@lure.pipex.net>,
  "Paul Hussein" <paul.hussein@dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> How about using Java for GUI and Ada95. There is a good tool here to help
> you connect
> http://www.ainslie-software.com/
>
>  ADAJNI
>

Yeah, I've used it with Marimba's now open source Bongo GUI builder
(www.freebongo.org) and with VisualAge for Java.  Very nice.

- Ed


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