New Ada portable GUI Library?
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From: Tomek Walkuski on 12 Jan 2008 08:37 Hi, someone wrote about need such kind of simple, non-GPL in "The future of Ada is at risk" thread. In which direction should it go? Portable means: native widgets on all platform (wxWidgets approach) or imitation of these (Swing approach)? Do you have any other ideas? Some design suggestions? I'm asking because I'm interested in this matter, maybe I will find time to start hacking this :) I'm trying to put first brick, start the discussion, maybe something good for the community will emerge?
From: Martin Krischik on 12 Jan 2008 10:19 Tomek Walkuski wrote: > In which direction should it go? Portable means: native widgets on all > platform (wxWidgets approach) or imitation of these (Swing approach)? > Do you have any other ideas? Some design suggestions? I think the wxWidgets idea is the best. Martin -- mailto://krischik(a)users.sourceforge.net Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com
From: Lucretia on 12 Jan 2008 13:12 On Jan 12, 3:19 pm, Martin Krischik <krisc...(a)users.sourceforge.net> wrote: > Tomek Walkuski wrote: > > In which direction should it go? Portable means: native widgets on all > > platform (wxWidgets approach) or imitation of these (Swing approach)? > > Do you have any other ideas? Some design suggestions? > > I think the wxWidgets idea is the best. Yes it is. I originally started to write a binding library to wxWidgets (http://www.archeia.com/home.html&tags=wxwidgets) but found it incredibly hard to do. We have just had a similar conversation on #Ada (freenode) about this. I think the best way is to create a very thin C lib which exports a bunch of functions for manipulating the underlying GUI lib and then build an Ada library on top of that. These C functions could, if you wanted, for certain platforms be another Ada library which exports to C (for compatibility to the above layer). This then allows binding to a GUI which already has a decent Ada port and to those which don't. Luke.
From: Tomek Walkuski on 12 Jan 2008 15:40 On 12 Sty, 19:12, Lucretia <lucret...(a)lycos.co.uk> wrote: > We have just had a similar conversation on #Ada (freenode) about this. > I think the best way is to create a very thin C lib which exports a > bunch of functions for manipulating the underlying GUI lib and then > build an Ada library on top of that. These C functions could, if you > wanted, for certain platforms be another Ada library which exports to > C (for compatibility to the above layer). This then allows binding to > a GUI which already has a decent Ada port and to those which don't. > > Luke. I think, there is no sense to do binding to wxWidgets. There should be "clean" implementation of something like wxWidgets. wxWidgets (and Java's SWT) use native GUIs, like GTK on Linux (I do not have any experience with Win32 API) which is already in C. I think that is necessary to prepare own (Ada) abstraction to various native toolkits.
From: Lucretia on 12 Jan 2008 18:01
On Jan 12, 8:40 pm, Tomek Walkuski <tomek.walku...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I think, there is no sense to do binding to wxWidgets. There should be > "clean" implementation of something like wxWidgets. Well, this is the conclusion I have come to. wxAda is a dead project (well to me anyway), but anyone wanted to restart to look into it again, the source is there. > wxWidgets (and Java's SWT) use native GUIs, like GTK on Linux (I do > not have any experience with Win32 API) which is already in C. > > I think that is necessary to prepare own (Ada) abstraction to various > native toolkits. Like I said, a thin C layer abstraction which is then imported into an Ada library and turned into a proper Ada GUI with native controls, this is the best way. For example: Ada GUI Thick bindings ------------------------ Ada GUI Thin bindings ------------------------ C abstraction layer <- Can be provided via C or Ada depending on lowest layer ------------------------ X11 | GtkAda | QT I know three is an X11 binding to Ada but it is old and uses preprocessing and if you want this library to be portable, you've no hope where that's concerned. Hence the use of a set of C calls whether these are written in C or Ada (with export(C, ...) pragmas). Hope that clarifies my point some more. Luke. |