Book to learn GtkAda

Book to learn GtkAda

[Michael Bode]

Hi,

I'm trying to learn both Ada and GUI programming in Ada preferably
using a toolkit that's available on both Linux and Windows. I figured
this would be GtkAda. So far I've only found the short tutorial on
GtkAda. Which Gtk book would you recommend for someone who wants to
use Gtk with Ada?

Btw: Would it be possible and even make sense to create an Ada binding
for Qt?

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[David Starner]

On 17 Oct 2001 23:29:54 +0200, Michael Bode <m.g.bode@web.de> wrote:
> Btw: Would it be possible and even make sense to create an Ada binding
> for Qt?

Sure. A direct binding to the C++ would highly GNAT-specific, though.
(GTKAda is GNAT-specific, but the authors claim it would be easy to fix
if anyone cares to.) The other problem would be the social problem, of
creating enough users and developers to keep it up to date and complete.
There's no technical reason why it can't be done, though, as far as I
know.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each 
one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less."
- "Disciple", Stuart Davis

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[Preben Randhol]

On 17 Oct 2001 23:29:54 +0200, Michael Bode wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to learn both Ada and GUI programming in Ada preferably
> using a toolkit that's available on both Linux and Windows. I figured
> this would be GtkAda. So far I've only found the short tutorial on
> GtkAda. Which Gtk book would you recommend for someone who wants to
> use Gtk with Ada?

Unfortunately there are not yet any Ada book on GtkAda, but there are
some books on Gtk+ in C. But GtkAda matches very closely GTK+ so they
are quite useful.

The Gtk+ tutorial
http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/

GTK+/Gnome Application Development (freely available on-line)
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/ggad.html

Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK
http://www.newriders.com/books/title.cfm?isbn=0735700214

> Btw: Would it be possible and even make sense to create an Ada binding
> for Qt?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtada/

As for on-line Ada books look here (if you haven't already found them):
http://www.adapower.com/learn/

Preben Randhol

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[David Starner]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001 08:58:37 +0000 (UTC), Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote:
>> Btw: Would it be possible and even make sense to create an Ada binding
>> for Qt?
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtada/

Read the page; its goal is to produce a clone, not a binding. It's also
in the planning stage, not anything useful.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each 
one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less."
- "Disciple", Stuart Davis

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[Adrian Knoth]

David Starner <dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu> wrote:

>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtada/
> Read the page; its goal is to produce a clone, not a binding. 

Is this good or not? I feel glad about every vanished C(++), but OTOH
a lot of people call Qt in the current state a supreme library. Not
necessary to mention that these guys are mainly KDE-boys.

And last but not least GtkAda as a binding instead of a new implementation
works well for all my projects (under UNIX, Win9x is very ugly in this way).


Is there any larger Ada-project going on, perhaps with GtkAda and/or
RDBMS? I need a "job" to spend my time in a useful manner :)


-- 
mail: adi@thur.de  	http://adi.thur.de	PGP: v2-key via keyserver

Aber ich mu� auch produktiv arbeiten, um genug Zeit f�r News zu haben.
					(Lutz Donnerhacke in dcsf)

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[David Starner]

On 18 Oct 2001 19:56:12 GMT, Adrian Knoth <adi@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de> wrote:
> David Starner <dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu> wrote:
> 
>>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtada/
>> Read the page; its goal is to produce a clone, not a binding. 
> 
> Is this good or not? I feel glad about every vanished C(++), but OTOH
> a lot of people call Qt in the current state a supreme library. 

Why produce a clone? If you want to get rid of the C++ part of it, write
something similar to it, but better. I don't see any way that one could
write a compariable library to GTK or QT with the amount of available
manpower; it's much more productive to write a binding and go make
something interesting.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each 
one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less."
- "Disciple", Stuart Davis

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[Adrian Knoth]

David Starner <dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu> wrote:

> I don't see any way that one could write a compariable library to GTK or 
> QT with the amount of available manpower; 

I can agree to this, but if you consider a possible feature where Ada
is widely used as a standard programming language there would be
a need for libraries written in Ada, too.

If you only encapsulate the C-Code by some Ada-wrapper-functions you'll
get a huge amount of C combined with tons of Ada, doing more or less
the same.

Think of PostgreSQL: there is a thick binding, I need libpq for it,
but it works very well. Ok, that's what you're saying: it works, use
it and do something interesting with it.
OTOH libpq itself could be implemented in Ada. I guess you'll find
a wrapped socket()-function in it. If there is a better abstraction
we even can get rid of this by providing a direct kernel-Interface.
After all, no C involved.

Don't ask me why, but I think this is better. You can use the main
Ada-features across your libraries, you don't need to convert types
between C and Ada, get all the checkings and so on.

> it's much more productive to write a binding and go make
> something interesting.

For sure, at the moment. But I don't want to have AdaOS with GTK written
in C. That's all :)

-- 
mail: adi@thur.de  	http://adi.thur.de	PGP: v2-key via keyserver

Der Computer ist die Antwort, doch was war eigentlich die Frage?

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[Florian Weimer]

Adrian Knoth <adi@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de> writes:

> Think of PostgreSQL: there is a thick binding, I need libpq for it,
> but it works very well. Ok, that's what you're saying: it works, use
> it and do something interesting with it.

There are some drawbacks.  For example, notifications are handled in a
way which is not very Ada-friendly, and by writing a binding to libpq,
you can hardly get rid of this.

> OTOH libpq itself could be implemented in Ada. I guess you'll find
> a wrapped socket()-function in it. If there is a better abstraction
> we even can get rid of this by providing a direct kernel-Interface.

That's the way I'm going to implement the next PostgreSQL binding.  (I
think it's the third one.)

> Don't ask me why, but I think this is better. You can use the main
> Ada-features across your libraries, you don't need to convert types
> between C and Ada, get all the checkings and so on.

I agree.  In addition, on GNU/Linux on 32 bit systems, you can avoid
some problems the C API currently has: 16 bit UID/GID types and 32
bit file offsets and inode numbers.  Of course, you can compile your
software with the appropriate flags (at least for the 64 bit file
system interface), but you still don't know if the library you use
works with large files, for example.

Starting mostly from scratch is quite a bit of work. but you can
correct such mistakes (and introduce others).  However, some problems
are very hard to correct, e.g. the interaction of seteuid(), open()
and tasking, or fork(), signals and tasking.

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[Ted Dennison]

In article <9qnc4s$gl7$1@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de>, Adrian Knoth says...
>
>Is there any larger Ada-project going on, perhaps with GtkAda and/or
>RDBMS? I need a "job" to spend my time in a useful manner :)

There's GVD, the GNU Visual Debugger, which uses GtkAda. Its website at
http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ has been down the last few days, but you can get
a glance at it through google's cache here -
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:YsMIuIWCu9c:libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/hl=xx-bork

(Note: remove the "hl=xx-bork" if you don't like to read your google messages in
mock-swedish like I do. :-)  )

Hopefully Act-europe will get their act together and get their websites up and
running soon. I notice that their main site seems to be down too.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

No trees were killed in the sending of this message. 
However a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[David Botton]

Try the mirror at http://www.adapower.net/libre


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com>

http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ has been down the last few days, but you can
get

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[DuckE]

Unfortunatly the GVD files are not mirrored, just the web pages.

SteveD


"David Botton" <David@Botton.com> wrote in message
news:tt0e7kmvlufl2e@corp.supernews.com...
> Try the mirror at http://www.adapower.net/libre
>
>
> "Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com>
>
> http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ has been down the last few days, but you
can
> get
>
>
>

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[David Starner]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 02:01:18 GMT, DuckE <nospam_steved94@home.com> wrote:
> Unfortunatly the GVD files are not mirrored, just the web pages.

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gvd.html has the source code
for GVD.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each 
one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less."
- "Disciple", Stuart Davis

Re: Book to learn GtkAda

[Preben Randhol]

On 18 Oct 2001 17:18:29 GMT, David Starner wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2001 08:58:37 +0000 (UTC), Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote:
>>> Btw: Would it be possible and even make sense to create an Ada binding
>>> for Qt?
>> 
>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtada/
> 
> Read the page; its goal is to produce a clone, not a binding. It's also
> in the planning stage, not anything useful.

Where did I say that it was a binding, or useful? I just supplied a link
that might be interesting.

Personally I don't see the reason for making a clone of the qt library,
but others might.

Preben