wxAda : is it vanished ?

wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

Hi boys and girls,

I was thinking about wxWidgets to target Mac OS, beceause it ties to
the underlying plateforme (I do not want something which would seems
to not have been made for Mac, especially on Mac) and beceause too it
will allow me to test on Windows (as I do not own a Mac)... well, to
be exhaustive, the licensing termes are appealing too.

So I've ended to learn about the Ada binding for wxWidget, that is,
wxAda, but all links to this either brings me to Tigris or
SourceForge, which botth does not contains any files at all for this
project, as you can check yourself :

http://wxada.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList (zero source
files in SVN repository)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wxada/files/ (no source archives at
all)

So I was just wondering if wxAda is dead or not and its corpse
disapperead on the way (sorry for teasing).

Do someone know how this adventure turns out ?



Have a nice day, and forget you've read silly things about a funny
corpse today (this may haunt just me)

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Lucretia9]

While I mention that it is dead on the tigris page, I have recently
started looking at it again from a slightly different angle. But
currently, there is no usable version.

Luke (wxAda author).

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Yannick Duchêne Hibou57]

On 12 août, 15:01, Lucretia9 <Lucretia9...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> While I mention that it is dead on the tigris page, I have recently
> started looking at it again from a slightly different angle. But
> currently, there is no usable version.
>
> Luke (wxAda author).

Hi Luke (alias Lucretia), nice to meet you :)

What is the new way to bind to wxWidgets you are thinking about ?

I guess its big work, as wxWidgets (previously wxWindows) is all in C+
+, and interfacing C++ with Ada, tipically requires an intermediate
binding in C... a tedious task.

If I can talk about my specific concerns : if I cannot use wxAda, I
will simply do as for the Windows API, creating a binding step by by
step, as comes the needs (the standard Ada Windows API binding is not
like what I was looking for).

As I said, I was interested in wxWidget rather than others, beceaue of
its license termes and beceause it is an interface to the underlying
OS, not an emulation which creates all its own widgets (I've seen
screen shots of GTK on Mac, it look like Gnome on Linux, and Qt does
an emulation too, althought it lies better).

To go further, Mac OS seems to like wxWidget, as it seems there are
wxWidgets headers in the standard Mac OS developpement environnement
(not GTK nor Qt) beside of the system and system framework headers. So
wxWidgets seems a good choice.

Back to the C++ implementation of wxWidgets : the most recommanded API
for Mac OS is Cocoa, which is Objective-C, which can be interfaced as
simply as C (if I believe the literature about it).

So one moment, I thought about simply writing an Ada bindind to Cocoa,
but as I do not own a Mac, I could not run any test at all (this will
be frightening).

If there was a Cocoa for Windows, this would be all fine, I could run
tests on Windows.. but there is no.

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Yannick Duchêne Hibou57]

Oops, I forgot :

Is some one interested in sponsoring an Ada to wxWidgets binding ?

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Lucretia9]

On Aug 13, 11:03 am, Yannick Duchêne Hibou57
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> On 12 août, 15:01, Lucretia9 <Lucretia9...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi Luke (alias Lucretia), nice to meet you :)

Hi, and you :)

> What is the new way to bind to wxWidgets you are thinking about ?

Well, to try to automate it using python scripts (if this doesn't work
another attempt with SWIG). Rather than define all tagged types as
non-limited types, they will be limited and they will have to
allocated
dynamically, this is how other bindings to C++ UI toolkits work and
really is the only way due to C++ semantics.

> I guess its big work, as wxWidgets (previously wxWindows) is all in C+
> +, and interfacing C++ with Ada, tipically requires an intermediate
> binding in C... a tedious task.

Yeah, bit job due to the size of wxWidgets, although I have no
intentions
of supporting the entire lib, there's stuff wxAda just doesn't
require.

> As I said, I was interested in wxWidget rather than others, beceaue of
> its license termes and beceause it is an interface to the underlying
> OS, not an emulation which creates all its own widgets (I've seen
> screen shots of GTK on Mac, it look like Gnome on Linux, and Qt does
> an emulation too, althought it lies better).

Yup, the license and also the ease of programming with wxWidgets is
what
got me started with it in the first place.

I think atm, your options are this:

1) Use AdaGtk on all platforms for now.
2) Develop your UI code in whatever language for whatever platform,
e.g.
C++ for Win32, Obj-C for Apple and then create the app code in Ada
providing
some sort of interface between the 2.

Luke.

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Lucretia9]

On Aug 13, 11:04 am, Yannick Duchêne Hibou57
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Oops, I forgot :
>
> Is some one interested in sponsoring an Ada to wxWidgets binding ?

Not that I know of and it is something I have considered, but it would
have to
be rather special as I have a full time job and I'm not in a position
to give
it up yet.

Luke.

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Yannick Duchêne Hibou57]

On 13 août, 13:20, Lucretia9 <Lucretia9...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Not that I know of and it is something I have considered, but it would
> have to be rather special as I have a full time job
Cheers, your good health :)

I've got full time, as I do not have a job, so if someone is
interested, I will be there. I could follow your recommandations for
the implementation if you wish.

Have a nice day Luke

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Micronian Coder]

Hi,

There is a library called Agar that is written in C. I have never used
it, but I found it interesting that someone added a thin Ada binding
to it. Currently, the Ada binding depends on AdaSDL since Agar depends
on SDL and OpenGL. However, version 1.4 of Agar is suppose to allow
for more variety of graphics drivers. In addition, Agar is available
for these platforms: FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, MacOS Classic, MacOS X,
NetBSD, OpenBSD and Windows. It even mentions Game Cube support for
anyone who is interested in that.

From the website libagar.org :

Agar is a modern open-source, cross-platform toolkit for graphical
applications implemented in C, C++ and Ada (with bindings to other
languages in development). Designed for ease of integration, it
follows the philosophy of building the GUI around the application and
not the other way around. Unlike most other GUI toolkits, Agar takes
maximum advantage of hardware graphics acceleration when it is
available via OpenGL, but it also supports traditional framebuffer
interfaces such as SDL direct video. The Agar API is entirely thread-
safe when Agar is compiled with optional threads support.

The distribution includes two libraries: Agar-GUI implements the base
Agar GUI system and a comprehensive set of standard widgets. Agar-GUI
is object-oriented and relies heavily on inheritance, virtual
functions and virtual filesystems. This functionality is implemented
by the GUI-independent Agar-Core library, which also includes various
utility and portability interfaces.

The Agar distribution also includes some more specialized libraries
aimed at specific applications, such as Agar-MATH, Agar-RG, Agar-VG
and Agar-DEV. Some of our other toolkits which extend (and rely on)
Agar include FreeSG, Edacious and cadtools.

Agar is free software. Its source code is freely usable and re-usable
by everyone under a BSD license, which allows use in commercial
applications free of charge. Agar is stable, well-maintained and has
been growing organically since early 2002. The Agar project is
sponsored by Csoft.net: Security conscious, high-availability Unix
hosting on redundant server arrays.

--Micronian

On Aug 13, 4:52 am, Yannick Duchêne Hibou57 <yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr>
wrote:
> On 13 août, 13:20, Lucretia9 <Lucretia9...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:> Not that I know of and it is something I have considered, but it would
> > have to be rather special as I have a full time job
>
> Cheers, your good health :)
>
> I've got full time, as I do not have a job, so if someone is
> interested, I will be there. I could follow your recommandations for
> the implementation if you wish.
>
> Have a nice day Luke

Re: wxAda : is it vanished ?

[Lucretia9]

On Aug 13, 6:03 pm, Micronian Coder <microni...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There is a library called Agar that is written in C. I have never used
> it, but I found it interesting that someone added a thin Ada binding
> to it. Currently, the Ada binding depends on AdaSDL since Agar depends
> on SDL and OpenGL. However, version 1.4 of Agar is suppose to allow

I'm aware of it and know the person who did the bindings. But, as the
OP
pointed out, he is actually wanting per platform native widgets.

Luke.