RE: GUI was Re: why Ada is so unpopular ?

RE: GUI was Re: why Ada is so unpopular ?

[amado.alves]

<<...
Various enthusiasts have suggested "Well let's go build one from 
bottom-dead-center and *make* it the library of choice..." - a noble 
ambition but one that *at best* would take a really long time...>>

There's another way: compromise. In the ASCLWG we eventually managed to agree upon selecting a pre-existing container library (Charles) to form the basis of the standard proposal. I didn't take long. The group was assembled in June 2002 (the Ada Europe workshop in Vienna), and the proposal was filed in September 2003 (AI-302/2). In the intervening dense discussion (circa 500 messages on the group list, plus circa 100 on the ARG forum) every one of us compromised about something from naming to featured abstractions to iteration methods.

If someone had started a similar process with GTK (or JEWL or...) we'd have it in Ada 2005, the standard GUI. Of course there is still plenty of time for a separate standard, or a reference API or whatever SIGAda calls it.

(I'm not disagreeing with anything, just telling a story.)

Re: GUI was Re: why Ada is so unpopular ?

[Marin David Condic]

Sure. Anything that is going to get done by a group is going to involve 
compromise. I can live with that. The important part is to get some 
start down a path that can be agreed upon and find some way of making it 
pay to build the end result.

My point was that volunteer efforts to build something are by their very 
nature going to be slow to build some relatively large end result. If 
ASCLWG was able to agree on Charles as a starting point, great. But to 
add on to Charles some larger body of capabilities (such as building a 
GUI on top of it) I think that could take *years* unless it got out of 
"All Volunteer" mode somehow.

You can adopt an existing thing like GtkAda or CLAW or JEWL or whatever 
as a starting point too. That has strengths and weaknesses as well. 
GtkAda, for example, doesn't use data structures that come out of 
Charles, right? So now you've got a hodgepodge collection of stuff 
instead of a well integrated toolset. If GtkAda was going to return a 
list of something, shouldn't it ought to be a *Charles* list rather than 
something that was specific to GtkAda? Might not the whole API to GtkAda 
be a better, more Ada-ish thing if it were using Charles data structures 
instead of being a band-aid over the top of a bunch of C parameters? 
Assuming Charles were to become "The Thing" for data structures, 
wouldn't a standard GUI for Ada want to exploit it to the max and be 
well integrated with it?

It might make a good start, but there could be years of effort needed 
from volunteers to produce something that met with expectations for a 
portable GUI for Ada.

MDC

amado.alves wrote:
> 
> There's another way: compromise. In the ASCLWG we eventually managed to agree upon selecting a pre-existing container library (Charles) to form the basis of the standard proposal. I didn't take long. The group was assembled in June 2002 (the Ada Europe workshop in Vienna), and the proposal was filed in September 2003 (AI-302/2). In the intervening dense discussion (circa 500 messages on the group list, plus circa 100 on the ARG forum) every one of us compromised about something from naming to featured abstractions to iteration methods.
> 
> If someone had started a similar process with GTK (or JEWL or...) we'd have it in Ada 2005, the standard GUI. Of course there is still plenty of time for a separate standard, or a reference API or whatever SIGAda calls it.
> 
> (I'm not disagreeing with anything, just telling a story.)
> 
> 
> 
> 


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Re: GUI was Re: why Ada is so unpopular ?

[Jeffrey Carter]

amado.alves wrote:
>
> There's another way: compromise. In the ASCLWG we eventually managed 
> to agree upon selecting a pre-existing container library (Charles) to 
> form the basis of the standard proposal. I didn't take long. The group 
> was assembled in June 2002 (the Ada Europe workshop in Vienna), and 
> the proposal was filed in September 2003 (AI-302/2). In the 
> intervening dense discussion (circa 500 messages on the group list, 
> plus circa 100 on the ARG forum) every one of us compromised about 
> something from naming to featured abstractions to iteration methods.

But the proposal isn't Charles and is very minimalist. The proposal 
based on the PragmAda Reusable Components (AI-302-01) has also had to 
change to something different from the PragmARCs. It's interesting that 
the original request for proposals asked for existing libraries for a 
secondary standard, but the actual proposal process forced us to propose 
new libraries with ARM wording as part of the Ada.* hierarchy.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Run away! Run away!"
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
58

GUI alternatives: FLTK reimplemented in Ada?

[T. Kurt Bond]

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> writes:
> My point was that volunteer efforts to build something are by their
> very nature going to be slow to build some relatively large end
> result. If ASCLWG was able to agree on Charles as a starting point,
> great. But to add on to Charles some larger body of capabilities (such
> as building a GUI on top of it) I think that could take *years* unless
> it got out of "All Volunteer" mode somehow.
> 
> You can adopt an existing thing like GtkAda or CLAW or JEWL or
> whatever as a starting point too. That has strengths and weaknesses as
> well.

If building something like GtkAda from scratch would be prohibitively
slow, building something with more limited aims might be easier to
accomplish.  For instance, FLTK (see http://www.fltk.org/ for more
information) is a cross platform GUI toolkit (MS Windows, X on Unix,
Mac OS X) written in C++.  It emphasizes being small and efficient but
flexible, and is under 100k lines of code, which includes a GUI User
Interface Designer.  Perhaps starting with the FLTK design and
redesigning and reimplementing it in Ada 95 would be a reasonable
target and a task of manageable size.

-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkb@citynet.net


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