Re: ANN: Introducing AdaBase - Thick database bindings for Ada

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

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<gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:f1c76310-e74f-4734-9961-5743e877b5e2@googlegroups.com...
>Le samedi 14 mai 2016 01:37:02 UTC+2, Randy Brukardt a écrit :

>> Impossible, I fear. I tried that with Claw, but even having a several 
>> year
>> head start didn't prevent someone from making their own incompatible
>> version.
>
>And in retrospect, it was a good thing: since around 2000, GWindows [1] is
>the only Ada thick binding for Windows maintained, developed, and usable
>for real applications (just tested the 3rd one, JEWL [2]; builds and runs 
>fine,
>but very limited beyond demos or toy projects).

Not remotely true (except the point about JEWL - but it was always intended 
to be easy rather than powerful).

(1) Plenty of real-world projects use/used Claw - I haven't asked for 
permission to talk about customers projects, but we've used it for the 
Trash-Finder UI, for the Claw Builder itself (a *very* tough task for an 
interface library), and a variety of internal tools.
(2) Claw was actively developed for many years after 2000, and still is 
actively maintained now. (Not doing much development because of lack of 
demand.)
(3) The above of course is a self-fufilling prophecy; once the split 
happened, the community had to make a choice and the effect was to duplicate 
all of the effort spent on Claw. The same effort could have been spent on 
enhancing Claw and more good stuff would have been available.

At least Claw was not a total waste of time: (1) it toughened up the OOP and 
finalization support in Ada compilers, so GWindows and the like were even 
possible. (When we started with Claw, most of our code didn't work on early 
Ada 95 compilers for one reason or another.) (2) Claw.Directories turned 
into Ada.Directories, and Claw.Time turned into Ada.Calendar.Arithmetic and 
Ada.Calendar.Formatting - so those things are now available to all Ada 
programmers. Too bad that I could never get Ada.Sockets (after Claw.Sockets) 
off the ground.

                           Randy.