Re: Ada to Motif bindings

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <38EB67AE.812FD691@businessobjects.com>,
  Marc CHEVRIER <mchevrier@businessobjects.com> wrote:
>
> You can also try a pure Ada approach for your Motif programming.
> Have a look to http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/topgraphx

The problem with a "pure" Ada approach is that its a lot tougher to
integrate with a GUI builder. Anyone seriously developing GUI's these
days uses some sort of GUI builder (or they have *very* patient
clients). All decent Motif GUI builders are capable of saving and
reading UIL code, so you have your choice of tools.

This approach allows you to:
   o  Modify GUI source code directly for small tweaks without having
the next run of the builder wipe out your work.
   o  Switch GUI builders later if you want or need to without having to
rewrite or redraw anything.
   o  Cleanly separate the GUI development effort from the application
effort.
   o  Only create objects in your Ada code for widgets that you need to
read or modify directly from the application (usually a very small
subset of all the widgets in a Motif application).
   o  Develop your own Motif bindings piecmeal on an as-needed basis.
   o  Detect many GUI coding errors at (UIL) compile time rather than
runtime.

So what are the drawbacks? Loading UID files takes a bit of time while
the file gets interpreted and all the widgets get created. In a normal
Motif app you could amortize this time by only creating widgets as they
are first needed. So you trade startup time for runtime. You can't use
any special features of your GUI builder that go outside the bounds of
Motif. So here you potentially trade functionality for portability.
That's about it, and I can usualy agree with both of those trade-offs.

--
T.E.D.

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


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