Re: GUI for Ada (GPS with GtkAda or GtkGlade GUI Builder)

[David Botton <david@botton.com>]

> GUI's with Ada are my biggest complaint with Ada. There seems to be no good, easy to use options.

I can only assume you mean GUI builders based on the rest of your post. Ada has (sadly license encumbered of all things on the Ada side...) versions of Gtk and Qt (same for any platform) and has GWindows which is superior to any Windows framework I've used on any platform and Gnoga which is already top notch for web apps and not bad for Desktop UIs but improving daily.


> There are several other options that are out there (GNOGA? GNAVI? some others) they seem like much more "demo" than anything else.

Gnavi the Ada delphi clone sits on top of GWindows, in theory if someone wanted could get Gnavi up and running again, was fully functional but I never packaged it. GWindows has been used for countless professional projects and looks as good as any windows app will and is easier to develop in then other frameworks. So as I said I assume you are thinking GUI dev tools not frameworks.

> I could never get it to work properly at all, clearly not polished, at the very least, not documented well enough.

Not sure which you are talking about, but there is descent community support for GWindows and Gnoga on their lists. If you use the Sourceforge versions of either you will have no issues getting them to work and both are very polished in terms of build and have decent examples and tutorials. Of course you could contribute funds for a pro documentation writer for less than most pay tools cost and get exactly what you ask for :)

> Lazarus for FreePascal is very nice

Sadly, Gnavi was already complete before Lazarus started and could easily be way beyond it today, but there was a long period when there was no real true free Ada compiler and I had already stopped using native Windows as a dev platform.

> I guess there are not enough Ada experts out there that care enough to have free GUI tools...

No just those that did got turned off by licensing issues when it would have made a difference. Of course today FSF GNAT is in good shape and so some like myself have returned and started work on new tools like Gnoga in the hopes that FSF GNAT and more community supported tools will come along since corporate visions are too short sited to value community and its contributions.

> Yes I do embedded work, so I don't always need a GUI. But I create stuff for my colleagues & customers as well and nobody will put up with a CLI application nowadays.

You would find Gnoga ideal in that situation. You can easily use existing HTML layout tools (I've posted some examples using web based ones on the Gnoga list) and in a few lines of code have that up and useful.

> > Please advise what shall I use to build the GUI...

Today I would only recommend Gnoga because of the flexibility for remote GUI use, cross platform completely to desktop, mobile and cloud.

If your app needed intense GUI use on desktop can even combine GTK (for the intense real time graphics) and Gnoga (forms, general use etc). (See the Gtk native doc in the docs dir).

David Botton