Re: New Ada portable GUI Library?

[Lucretia <lucretia9@lycos.co.uk>]

On Jan 12, 8:40 pm, Tomek Walkuski <tomek.walku...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think, there is no sense to do binding to wxWidgets. There should be
> "clean" implementation of something like wxWidgets.

Well, this is the conclusion I have come to. wxAda is a dead project
(well to me anyway), but anyone wanted to restart to look into it
again, the source is there.

> wxWidgets (and Java's SWT) use native GUIs, like GTK on Linux (I do
> not have any experience with Win32 API) which is already in C.
>
> I think that is necessary to prepare own (Ada) abstraction to various
> native toolkits.

Like I said, a thin C layer abstraction which is then imported into an
Ada library and turned into a proper Ada GUI with native controls,
this is the best way. For example:

 Ada GUI Thick bindings
------------------------
 Ada GUI Thin bindings
------------------------
  C abstraction layer   <- Can be provided via C or Ada depending on
lowest layer
------------------------
   X11 | GtkAda | QT

I know three is an X11 binding to Ada but it is old and uses
preprocessing and if you want this library to be portable, you've no
hope where that's concerned. Hence the use of a set of C calls whether
these are written in C or Ada (with export(C, ...) pragmas).

Hope that clarifies my point some more.

Luke.