Re: question on GtkAda

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:57:14 -0800, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:

> The way I understand it, is that GtkAda is a binding (thick) to Gtk+.

Rather thin than thick.
 
> On http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/gtkada/ it says
> 
> "GtkAda supports the latest 2.14 stable releases."

I am using it with 2.16 and 2.18, maybe 2.22 too, I don't remember all
installations I made.
 
> But on http://www.gtk.org/download-linux.html
> 
> It says the latest stable release is 2.22

I don't think there is any big difference.

> There is a plan to have GTK+ 3.0 sometime,  from what I read,
> will this mean GtkAda will be updated to that at some point
> as well?

That is up to AdaCore. Remember that GtkAda is far from being a complete
bindings. Gtk is nebulous, in fact_ there are various libraries, Gtk, Gdk,
GIO, Glib, Pango etc, which may stand for "Gtk,"  depending on the
interpretation of the term. GtkAda provides different amount of support for
them, from almost full, to none. Some missing parts you can find here:

http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de/ada/gtkada_contributions.htm

> Another question: If someone want to do plotting from Ada, how
> would one do that? GtkAda is just for making GUI?

You can use GtkAda (its Gdk part) for this, I did it more or less
successfully. Though, now there is a far better choice, since Damien
Carbonne made Cairo bindings:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cairoada/

> I see there are libraries that uses Gtk+ for plotting, such as
> Gtkextra http://gtkextra.sourceforge.net/  and
> GtkPlot http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtkplot/ , so, If I
> install GtkAda, how would one use these libraries? do I need
> to make binding to them as well?

I was using Gdk and am presently using Cairo. Since Gtk is not
multitasking.

I avoid Gtk higher-level primitives, because they would do much non-graphic
work, which could not be moved to an independent task. I hate blocking and
hanging UI.

> Any one knows of applications using Ada to make plotting and
> data visualization using GtkAda?

http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de/ada/fuzzy_ml.htm

It does a lot of plotting in Gtk (through Gdk).

> Are people using GtkAda in any real commercial applications?
> It seems GPS is the largest known app which does that?

Probably.

> I am basically looking for a way to make a simple GUI in Ada,
> and also be able to generate 2D and 3D plots. Just for trying
> something. nothing commercial.

IMO, the choice is Gdk vs. Cairo. If your plotting is not demanding in
terms of performance, e.g. you aren't going to create an 100 channel
oscilloscope indicating 0.1ms inputs, then Cairo is the first thing to
check. Otherwise, you should evaluate its overhead, and maybe do some parts
in Gdk.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de