Re: The Hobby Lobby was Windows CE?

["David Botton" <David@Botton.com>]

Speaking as one of the many "willing to commit their own resources to the
creation of products programmed in Ada", it is just as important to have
people use, test and comment on the creations! The encouragement from a pat
on the back, "hey that's cool" goes a long way and nothing, nothing is
better than some one telling you that there is a bug in the code or pointing
out a cool feature to add, perhaps even sending in some change or addition.

AdaCOM (The precursor to GNATCOM, you may say the successful entrepreneurial
side of COM for Ada) would likely not have been completed if not for people
like Rob Veenker who kept poking at it and using it.

GWindows (now in Beta and soon to have its first release) was 95% completed
and laying dormant for around 8 months. Between some personal issues and
later overwhelming release schedules from work it sort of got placed on the
major back burner. I probably would have just left it there for another few
months if not for the persistence of Wiljan Derks and Andre Van Splunter,
both of whom encouraged and pushed me to get back in to developing it in
addition to sending in a number of their own changes / bug fixes. No
GWindows is completed and has advanced features like Database binding to
controls and more.

Between both, Ada is a complete Win32 solution with more inherent power then
Delphi, VB and VC++ combined.

I am already working on a new project (in addition to changes to GNATCOM and
GWindows) called GNavi (Navi is Hebrew for prophet ;-), a round trip RAD
engineering tool for Ada using GNATCOM and GWindows (can we say Delphi/VB
killer!) Not just a GUI builder, but an entire development environment. I
hope to make some sort of preview of it by end of year.

To sum it up, what Ada needs is not just dedicated people to develop, but
also dedicated people to use, test, comment and give good PR (much as you do
your self :-) and encouragement to everyone in the community!

David Botton

(Shameless plug -
    GNATCOM - http://www.adapower.com/gnatcom support available from ACT
support@gnat.com
    GWindows - http://www.adapower.com/gwindows)




"Richard Riehle" <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message
news:3BAF77E6.9BDE9102@adaworks.com...

> What Ada needs, indeed it is already happening, is the dedication of
people who
> are willing to commit their own resources to the creation of products
programmed
>
> in Ada, for a variety of platforms.   Many of these might be hobbyists who
will
> go
> on to be successful entrepreneurs.   It is not likely they will be doing
this
> under the
> auspices of some company already committed to some other language
technology.