Re: Ada GUI for Windows and Linux

[Eric Merritt <cyberlync@yahoo.com>]

> 
> I mentioned XUL because the article said that it was
> becoming popular.
> It seems to me that Ada gains if it can talk to the
> same API's that
> other languages talk to, and that Ada gains if
> language-neutral API's
> succeed.  

 I like the idea of XUL but its not really that
popular ourside of the mozilla community. I personally
find it a bit cludgy, but it works. I guess if I was
looking to do something like this I would probably
turn something like xwt (www.xwt.org). Its a gui
toolkit that interfaces with any xml-rpc server
(although I am not sure if there is an xml-rpc server
for Ada). If the xforms spec ever gets off the ground
that would be pretty sweet as well.


> Creating an application with AWS does present some
> challenges compared
> to doing it with typical RAD/GUI development.  If
> the user's progress
> through the UI is possibly lengthy and flexible, two
> UI questions are
> problematic (at least for me)  (1) What happens if
> the user hits
> the 'Back' button? (if you've got session info, you
> will want unlimited
> undo support to roll it back) 

 This is more or less way to complicated. If you force
refresh and handle each request atomically you can
pretty much ignore the back button. I think most
people realize that back the back button and an 'undo'
feature are two completly diffrent things. 

> and (2) What happens
> if the user hits the 
> 'Open in New Window' button? (how to fork a session?
>  The 'New Window' 
> in IE also duplicates the current page).

 Most browsers will duplicate the page. Once again if
you handle requests atomically this shouldn't matter.
All you should really keep in the session is user
identity information, and perhaps some globally
usefull information as it arises. If you do otherwise
it will end up biting you in the but. Of course, you
pay for this in increased data accesses.


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