Gnoga - The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada

[David Botton <david@botton.com>]

This is not an announcement of a 1.0 yet, but a progress report. It helps me stay focused and motivated along with a source for ideas and inspiration to post things, so here we go.

BTW, you can play the snake game running in Ada now over the internet, http://www.gnoga.com - NO JS and HTML that is done with Gnoga bindings to the Canvas and DOM.

I am busy working on the code at the moment so the documentation is mainly in the specs and samples for the moment and I have not had time to make a nice website for it yet, however http://www.gnoga.com is there and a link to the sourceforge site.

An introduction to what it is:

1. First and foremost the project goal is a cross platform GUI toolkit. but Instead of targeting Windows, X, Gtk or Qt, it targets the HTML5 browser. No not HTML or JS, the "browser". It acts like a "terminal" for Gnoga to render its magic. If you try and do a view source on the browser all you will get is the websocket code used to set up the communications. Long term you will be able to package a native app (.exe, .app, etc.)

2. Because the "browser" is the target it means that Gnoga applications can run local or remote. If you can get AWS running on your "board" you can use Gnoga for the front end. Yes you could write HTML and respond to Http requests etc using AWS, but with Gnoga your app is always connected and live in the browser back to the server. You can be showing real time stats, no Ajax, JSON, etc to worry about, oh yes and all of it is in Ada you don't have to touch those sick little braces { } pocked with ;;;;

3. It just happens to be that Gnoga can also create great websites with dynamic content using HTML, CSS and Ada (that's right not JS)... It's a nice bonus.

4. In fact Gnoga comes already with a number of Ada on Rails like features. Including Active Record support with bindings to MySQL and SQLite and can easily be expanded to other SQL engines.

5. There is a whole lot there already but.. there is still a lot more to go. Don't pass judgement till at least all the components are in, 6-8 weeks.

6. With this you will get things like OpenGL programming via WebGL (coming), it already has a full canvas 2d binding, and any other techi goodness thrown at the web.

7. Multimedia bindings are not far behind for video, audio, etc.

8. You will get access to client side HTML5 goodness like local storage on the client browser, etc. it's all coming.

9. Gnoga can easily use now or be extended later to bind anything that can run in a browser, JS GUI toolkits, XUL for direct native apps, etc. etc.

10. While most of the world is fighting to get JS and HTML to run and do anything, Ada get's to sit back and enjoy the ride to every new tech as it comes and still have a solid language and the ability to create secure Web apps and services dispatched from solid systems.

It's tough to get the full vision in words and there are not too many pictures to see, but if I get you excited about Ada for application development, well than I'm getting somewhere and we will both arrive soon enough at the goal :)

David Botton