From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,be23df8e7e275d73 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-07-17 00:50:52 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!opentransit.net!proxad.net!feeder2-1.proxad.net!nnrp6.proxad.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Sender: briot@lyon.act-europe.fr Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: An Ada IDE and discussions References: <0zS27.187213$DG1.31590366@news1.rdc1.mi.home.com> <3B4FEFDE.10E7B423@snafu.de> <9iuvsd$361$1@nh.pace.co.uk> From: Emmanuel Briot Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.0.103 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 07:50:51 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 213.228.58.160 X-Complaints-To: abuse@proxad.net X-Trace: nnrp6.proxad.net 995356251 213.228.58.160 (Tue, 17 Jul 2001 09:50:51 CEST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 09:50:51 CEST Organization: Guest of ProXad - France Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:10048 Date: 2001-07-17T07:50:51+00:00 List-Id: "Marin David Condic" 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