[AWS] Writing a wiki software with aws

[Thomas Løcke]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Christian Forster <boronk at boronk.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My Name is Christian Forster and I am from germany. I have written a wiki
> software for private use in perl. Now, almost satisfied with the outcome a
> thought it would be a good idea to reimplement it with a faster language.
>
> Knowing ada from work, I think, despite the elaborate code it would be a good
> idea to use it for some type of web application.


A worthy goal indeed!


>
> But before I begin, I want to be sure that some things do work or are at least
> available in ada.
>
> I would need the following features:
>
> * some type of flex/yacc - tools to write the parser to transform the
> wikimarkup into html. This is now done with a executable written in C which is
> called seperately as a process


Perhaps something like this:  http://www.stephe-leake.org/ada/opentoken.html


> * support for xslt, which is now done with xsltproc and I think would be
> better to be integrated


I'm not aware of any Ada powered XSLT processors. Perhaps a binding
could be made to xsltproc?


> * a print or pdf library to render the pages as pdf. at the moment i use
> PDF::API2, the code could be converted to ada, but I need some backend to draw
> the characters and images on the pages. Some cairo wrapper could be sufficient
> if it is available.


Perhaps GNU.PDF:  http://www.tc.umn.edu/~puk/


> * SSL support (I think, that is available)


It's available in AWS:
http://www.adacore.com/wp-content/files/auto_update/aws-docs/aws.html#Secure-server


> * picture conversion/resize/mangling libraries for at least png,jpg and svg.
> The more the better. This is now done with imagemagick.


https://gna.org/projects/g2f/


> * some type of safe server side scripting. I use at the moment JE for that
> purpose, but that is really, really slow. This is needed to give the writer of
> the texts in the wiki the possibility to do some automation or form-handling.
> The best would be to have some type of javascript engine since all is written
> in javascript. If only other languages are available like lua, this would be
> also ok.


I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but GNATCOLL allows
for embedding script languages:
http://www.adacore.com/wp-content/files/auto_update/gnatcoll-docs/gnatcoll.html#Embedding-script-languages


> Is this possible?


I think most of what you want is possible, if not in pure Ada, then in
the form of bindings to existing libraries. Whether or not the above
suggestions actually work I don't know.  :o)

I'm very interested in hearing how your AdaWiki project turns out. I'm
on my own quest to move away from an interpreted language (PHP/XSLT)
to a pure AWS environment, and a wiki is also on my long list of
things I need before I can get rid of PHP completely.

Good luck!
Thomas Løcke