Re: An Ada IDE and discussions

[Emmanuel Briot <briot@act-europe.fr>]

"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:

> The last time I looked at Gtk, my conclusion was this: "It has potential. It
> needs a good 'How To' book"


And of course, being a person who really wants to develop Ada, you decided to
contribute one, so that Ada could be used by more developers... I must have
missed it, though.


> The reason for me is that the Motif-ish style of building a GUI
> wasn't intuitively obvious (my world is different) and there was not a good
> "Let me take you step-by-step through the process of building a GUI with
> Gtk" manual available.

About the Motif-ish style: for people not completely aware of GUI programming,
this means that basically your interface is built through blocks and boxes,
that you embed in others boxes, and so on. This hugely facilitates the handling
of resizing, since the containers themselves take care of repositionning the
widgets at the right location.

Now, there's also a documented widget in GtkAda, called Gtk_Fixed, that
provides the windows style of programming (for the few things I know about
windows), that is you specify the coordinates and sizes of the widgets. This is
of course usable from the GUI builder. So the restriction Marin is speaking
about doesn't seem to apply. Of course, you are on your own to manage the
repositioning of widgets after the window has been resized by the user...



> I'd received advice to read up on the underlying C calls and got pointed at
> related documents of similar flavor. If I had the time, I suppose I could
> delve into it and learn enough to make it work.  Maybe by now someone has
> written a "How To" guide for it & I should take another glance at it? I
> certainly wouldn't discourage you from looking it over.

And I would say the same thing again: there are some very good books about C
programming and gtk+ programming. They fully apply to GtkAda, since basically
what is needed in a howto is to describe the various containers and explain how
to build an interface from there, not all the low-level details specific to Ada.

The only area where things are really different is for callbacks, and the
technics is fully describe in the 31 pages of the GtkAda user's guide.

You should really consider contributing such a howto, if you think the existing
documentation is not enough.

Of course, supported users of ACT do ask questions that get answered generally
very fast, so that they don't stay blocked...

Emmanuel