Re: NetBeans and ADA?

[Eric Merritt <cyberlync@yahoo.com>]

--- Justin Cummings <jcummings8@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> With the recent lack of activity, I thought this may
> provide a little spark
> in the discussion...
> 
> The "NetBeans" development environment has proven to
> be stable, open-source,
> multi-platform, highly-extensible, full-featured,
> standards-based,
> widely-used, indefinately supported .. and free..
> IDE/development studio.
> This would seem like a natural progression from the
> basic text, GTK, or
> TCL/TK cross-platform development tool-set; however,
> none to my knowledge
> exists.
> 
> Why has an ADA language module not been produced (or
> even proposed) for
> Netbeans?   Or is there one... open-source or not,
> which receives little
> promotion or recognition?  If so where could I find
> information about it?
> 
> For a number of years a marriage between Java and
> Ada in application
> development has been in place, thus the apparent
> 'lack of' an ADA module for
> NetBeans is quite surprising to say the least. 
> Given the dwindling list of
> vendors that will continue to develop and support
> ADA tools makes something
> like this more and more appealing...the last release
> of Rational Apex was
> two+ years ago?  Sun dropped support what, four to
> five years ago?  I'd like
> to see more options available other than just
> GNAT...

I have been thinking along these same lines, though
not for netbeans (I personally dislike that particular
development platform). Brewing in my mind has been a
set of plugins to support Ada in the Eclipse
environment. As yet it is just an idea in the very
early stages of forming, but at least this shows that
someone else is haveing the same ideas. 

For those of you not familiar with these platforms for
development (IDE's actually). They are both supposedly
cross language development envirnments orginally
supporting java. Netbeans is by far the more mature of
the two and can be found at www.netbeans.org. Eclipse
is a new open source offering from IBM and a group of
vendors. Its heritage includes the VisualAge for Java
series of IDE's (Personally the best in the business
from my perspective) and further back the Envy
smalltalk envirnment. It may be viewed at
www.eclipse.org. Both of these are open source and
freely available. I do warn you however that both are
also resource hogs like no other.


If anyone is interested in taking on this project I
would be willing to put in time to see this come to
fruition even in netbeans.

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