RE: GUI toolkit for Ada

["Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif
To: Larry Kilgallen et al.
You wrote, "A browser window is hardly a native GUI interface. It is an
application that uses the native GUI interface in an application-specific
fashion (the application being the browser)."

Although, this may be technically true for many of the present browsers, it
is definitely not required. In principle, a browser could be written to have
virtually all of the graphical user interface be based on Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG) and XML entities, such as XForms 1.0. The browser can display
this material by using software supplied by the operating system vendor or
from another party. I do not believe that there is any significant technical
impediment for creating in Ada a portable browser that displays, prints and
operates with XML. Obviously, there are significant financial and other
business based difficulties that could preclude the creation of a browser in
Ada. There is one good business argument for creating a browser in Ada, many
customers including myself are very tired and frustrated by crashes of their
browser.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Larry Kilgallen
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2001 11:23 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: GUI toolkit for Ada


In article <3B361BC8.66747869@easystreet.com>, Al Christians
<achrist@easystreet.com> writes:
> Larry Kilgallen wrote:
>>
> <jeltsch@tu-cottbus.de> writes:
>> > is there a multi-platform GUI toolkit for Ada out there, which uses
native
>> > look-and-feel by using native GUI libraries?
>>
>> I believe that is an impossible requirement.
>> The closest you could hope to achieve is least-common-denominator
>> use of native features.
>
> There are two toolkits that connect to Tcl and Tk:  Rapid and VAD.
> I think that Tk uses 'native' look and feel, whatever that means.

Certainly Tcl and Tk are not native to VMS or Windows.

> Rapid includes only a small set of widgets, but it is very easy
> to get going with.  Another alternative is to use the Ada Web Server
> or cgi to produce HTML as the GUI, so that presentation is through
> the 'native' browser.

A browser window is hardly a native GUI interface.
It is an application that uses the native GUI interface in an
application-specific fashion (the application being the browser).