Re: ObjectAda 7.2.2 and VB6 DLLs

[dave.wood@aonix.com]

Hi Richard,

It's somewhat disappointing to see commentary such as that below. As
you are on our mailing list, you should be receiving our periodic
newsletters and other marketing material to keep you generally
informed about our Ada happenings.

For example, you should have received at least three invitations to
our recent "Trends in Critical Systems" seminar series (http://
www.aonixnews.com/sep07/seminarao.htm) conducted with great success in
several locations across the US in joint cooperation with Wind River,
Verocel, and OIS. 50% of our focus in these seminars was on Ada-
related material.

You may also find it useful to visit our web site, where you will find
that our last three press releases, and four of the last five, have
been dedicated to Ada subject matter. You can imagine my surprise to
hear that our Ada news is a "well-guarded secret"!

I was equally surprised to learn that "none of the Ada compiler
companies has the will, the initiative, the management leadership, nor
the imagination" to do their part in making Ada visible. I feel
certain that, like Aonix, AdaCore, DDC-I, and others expend resources
promoting their Ada products proportionate to their perception of
market capacity and revenue expectations. I can assure you that the
costs of developing and implementing seminars, webinars, newsletters,
PR campaigns, trade shows, and other activities are quite substantial
and not to be dismissed lightly.

Another example of Ada vendors supporting Ada visibility is the new
Hibachi Eclipse project (http://aonix.com/pr_11.05.07.html) to provide
standard Eclipse plugins for Ada. This project was initiated by Aonix
and is enjoying the participation of all the Ada vendors, each
contributing their resources to the effort. Aonix seeded the project
by providing our AonixADT technology as open source. AonixADT was
developed by Aonix at significant engineering cost and represents a
substantial step up for Ada solutions in the Eclipse environment, so
contributing it to the community as open source is no small matter.

Regarding Ada 2005 support, as Dirk mentioned, enhancing our Ada 2005
support is an ongoing engineering activity. It is an important
activity for us, but it is neither our only nor our most important Ada
product engineering activity. Our feature priorities are demand-
driven. As we approach a delivery date for that technology upgrade, we
will not be shy about publicizing it.

We really do appreciate the ongoing support of the academic community
in spreading the good word about Ada. Aonix has been a strong
proponent of academic use of Ada for many years, and we've given away
literally hundreds of thousands of our products in support of
academia, and will continue to do so.

Dave Wood, VP Marketing, Aonix
dave.wood@aonix.com


On Dec 6, 11:21 pm, <adawo...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I wonder why Aonix keeps information about ObjectAda such a well-guarded
> secret.  In Academia we never hear anything from them.
>
> My own students are primarily military officers, some of whom are in a position
> to influence software decisions once they graduate from NPS.  At present, the
> only compiler publisher to keep us abreast of changes involving Ada is AdaCore.
> We used to hear from DDC-I on a monthly basis, but they seem to have dropped
> by the wayside.  We never hear from any of the other compiler publishers so Ada
> looks as if it is only GNAT to our organization.
>
> At present, there seems to be no organization that promotes Ada.   Does the ARA
> still exist?   Oh, yes, there is SigAda, but even they are not pro-active in
> promoting
> Ada.   If it were not for the efforts of AdaCore, no one would realize that Ada
> is
> still a viable language for real projects.  We need to find some way to get more
> visibility
> for Ada.   It seems it will have to be a grass-roots effort since none of the
> Ada compiler
> companies has the will, the intiative, the management leadership, nor the
> imagination to do it.
>
> Richard Riehle