Building Windows 10 Universal Apps with Ada

[David Botton <david@botton.com>]

With Gnoga (http://gnoga.com) it is possible to build "modern" Windows apps with Ada. Until some day we have a working up to date (non GPL encumbered) .NET compiler or LLVM backend part of your code will need to be executed either on a server or the local machine as an older Win64 or Win32 service, but you can take full advantage of the platform and run the client side on an XBox, Windows PC, Phone, etc. (event submit to the app store).

Essentially the steps are:

1. Create a new VisualStudio JS Windows Universal App project.
2. Copy boot.js and jquery.min.js from gnoga/js to your_project/js
3. Modify default.html to include the two js files.
4. Modify boot.js to hard code the server location (ws://snake.gnoga.com:8080/gnoga for example).

Done.

You can use any Windows APIs, etc. by simply binding them like other JS script. If there is interest perhaps I'll bind some of the basics in the future.

For those not familiar this solution is very different than serving out web pages, your Ada code will have direct interactive control of every element of the Windows app.

David Botton