Re: JGnat support. was NetBeans and ADA?(Co-opt Java?)

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Here may be a reason that Ada-to-Java-Byte-Code may not have been meeting
with much commercial success. If someone is going to build something that
runs on the JVM and has to have all that Java stuff around anyway, why
create the extra problems of piling on a third-party product? Why not just
use the Java stuff and be done with it?

This is another case of Ada playing catch-up and going "Me Too!!" and not
offering a significant enough perceived advantage to the prospective user.
From the non-Ada-ite's perspective (or the non-techie) it gets perceived as
"Why should I make my life harder just to use your favorite pet language?"
Dredging up "reliability" and "maintainability" and all that to someone
developing web applets just doesn't seem to have much advantage.

Now if Ada took a look at what the whole Java environment was doing and
built its own little world just like Java did and along the way said
something to the effect of: "I've got the same capability as the Java
development environment, but I do it differently and add all these other
spiffy capabilities and give you something useful that you can't get with
Java..." then it would have something there.

IBM didn't get into the PC business by deciding to make an Apple II clone -
they broke new ground and offered the market numerous things you couldn't
get with an Apple II. Otherwise there wouldn't have been much incentive to
buy an IBM PC if it was just a "me too!" effort. (Some incentive - it is,
after all, Big Blue! :-) They'd forever have to chase Apple's tail which
ultimately would mean Apple wins.

Maybe if Ada offered its own byte code interpreter and libraries and other
stuff and maybe built its own GUI based on XML and somehow found a way of
saying "This does more/better/faster/cheaper..." it would offer something to
the guys doing things in Java now that might convince them to switch.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Wannabe h4x0r" <chris@dont.spam.me> wrote in message
news:DYii8.7895$Yv2.3042@rwcrnsc54...
>
> However, perhaps one could swipe the Java idea entirely and create an Ada
> bytecode compiler with Java support, rather than the other way around,
> no? I suspect the added flexibility of Ada(Ada95 in particular) would
> make this a very useful tool for certain software engineering problems
> that many of the engineers on this newsgroup are or will be dealing with.