Re: GUI builder for Ada

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <89qvr8$ehq$1@aaanet.ru>,
  "Dmitry Samsonov" <dis@icomm.ru> wrote:
> > My personal favorite approach for Motif is to use a UIL GUI builder.
> > You can then compile it into .uid with the UIL compiler and import
> > the whole shebang into your Ada program with one Motif call.
>
> Tell me please, where I can giv more information about your GUI
> builder? And is there version for Linux on Intel existing ?

*My* GUI builder? There is no T.E.D. GUI builder (yet :-)).

What I was referring to was the UIL language and compiler that comes as
part of every Motif distrubution. If you want more info about UIL,
just look at any good Motif book. If you have the O'Reilley X series
of books, the back part of 6B talks about it in detail.

Just about every Motif-based gui builder can read and write UIL. This is
nice becuase that means you aren't tied to any one vendor (assuming you
can resist the temptation of using any non-UIL compatable features they
might build into the GUI builder to tie you down). If they raise their
prices or go out of business, just switch to their next best competitor
and go on like nothing happened.

From the Ada side its nice because you don't have to pollute your pretty
Ada sources with all that grisly GUI setup code. Just a couple of calls
imports the whole compiled GUI; sort of like you are loading a runtime
library. Since UIL is a language designed to specify Motif GUI's, the
UIL compiler can do all sorts of sanity checks that an Ada or C compiler
could not hope to do. Also, most cosmetic GUI changes can be made
without having to recompile your Ada code at all.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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