Re: Development process in the Ada community

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

Lets see.. that's (onetwothreefour...) *six* different bindings to Windows -
each with different features/capabilities, but probably a good deal of
overlap. (Will we hear of more? Consider that a "binding to Windows"
could/should include things like sockets and similar stuff, so maybe we've
got to start rounding up the packages that do this as well...???) Sounds
like a Department of Redundancy Department effort to me. :-) Kind of makes
Tom's point, too.

Probably, you really need to have Win32Ada (or similar) no matter what. This
thin binding is needed just to keep up with whatever Microsoft comes out
with next as the OS API, so that if it didn't get included in the more
abstract API, the programmer still has access to it. (It was originally
auto-generated, right? So if a new C interface comes out, it can easily be
re-auto-generated? Sounds important to me...)

But could CLAW be made to incorporate (in an abstract sense - not
necessarily with an identical realization) whatever capabilities the others
offer and provide a common platform for development? Probably, the hard part
would be to define some sort of "portable" subset so it could work on
Linux/Unix as well & cover features done by GtkAda. (Although it might be
possible to map GtkAda's XML description of the GUI to a CLAW-equivalent
implementation?) If you don't insist on portability, you've at least got A
Good Start at a common Windows interface, right? Probably parts of it would
constitute A Good Start at a common Ada utility library if the portable
parts were identified.

I think this is an indication of how we may tout Ada's reusability and
portability, but we're not very good at exploiting it - because it wasn't
invented here? Or because it costs money? Why?

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


"Stephen Leake" <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in message
news:ud6wydz64.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov...
> dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison) writes:
>
> >
> > I'm not too sure what you are referring to here. The ones I'm aware of
> > are:
> >
> > o  Claw     - Nicely high-level, and compiler portable, but
> > proprietary.
> > o  Win32Ada - Free, Comes with every Windows Ada95 compiler I've seen,
> > very low-level (think C in Ada).
> > o  GWindows - Free, high-Level, only works with Gnat, only realy
> > supports GUI operations, not all of Win32.
> > o  Jewl     - GPL (usable only in GPL-ed programs or ones that won't
> > be distributed), *Too* High-level, Probably(?) only works with Gnat.
>
> Windex : Open Source, unsupported, works with GNAT and maybe
> ObjectAda, reasonable subset of Win32.
>
> GtkAda : Open Source, supported by ACT, full GUI interface, portable
> to other windowing/operating system
>
> Windex "competes" directly with Claw and GWindows. I wrote it because
> Claw was not open source, and GWindows was not available. I'm not
> clear why David Botton wrote GWindows instead of extending Windex.
> They do have different designs under the hood.
>
> GtkAda also competes, but since it's strictly a GUI binding, not an OS
> binding, and it is platform independent, it's in a different class.
>
> Jewl could probably be written on top of any of these.
>
> --
> -- Stephe