[gtkada] FW: Rapid application development VB vs Ada

[Kester, Rush W.]

Al Christians asked the following question in response to my post on Team
Ada.
As I am just getting started, with GtkAda, I thought it best to let someone
with
more GtkAda experience answer.

Rush Kester 
Software Systems Engineer 
AdaSoft at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. 
email:  rush.kester at jhuapl.edu 
phone: (240) 228-3030 (live M-F 9:30am-4:30pm, voicemail anytime) 
fax:   (240) 228-6779 
http://hometown.aol.com/rwkester/myhomepage/index.html 


-----Original Message-----
From: Al Christians [mailto:achrist at easystreet.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2000 3:07 PM
To: Kester, Rush W.
Cc: TEAM-ADA at ACM.ORG
Subject: Re: Rapid application development VB vs Ada (was RE: What the
competition looks like


"Kester, Rush W." wrote:
> 
> 
> GtkAda now provides the GUI widgets you are seeking and the available
widget
> set is growing rapidly.  What's important is that unlike VB, they are
> portable to non-Microsoft platforms.  It works with Win32 and any platform
> that support Windows X11. This means that the applications developed on
> Wintel platforms can run on Linux, Unix, & MS Windows, etc.  For more
> information see, http://gtkada.eu.org/
> 

Is GtkAda ready for real serious Windows application development, as in 
'my livelihood depends on it'?  If I look at the page

http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/ 

I get the idea that it won't even run in 256 color mode.  I don't want 
to ship code that makes my users go into Control Panel to see if it will
run.   What will happen if I develop with Gtk on my machine with large
fonts and the screen set to 800x600, and my customer tries to run 
it at 640x480 or 1024x768 with small fonts?   I can get fair results 
with some commercial products under such circumstances.      

My machine is set to 32768 colors, but the Glade program crashed for me 
last time I simply tried to generate code for one of the supplied demo 
programs.  I should give to my customers something that's not even
stable for me running its own demos?

I'm not complaining, I'd love to use GtkAda whenever it makes sense,
but I'm patient.  Even with good, easy GUI's, for much of my work the 
commercial development products for Windows (I'm using Delphi quite
a bit now) are still ahead because of:   1) data-aware controls, 2) 
report writers, 3) printer support that is good enough to ship to end
users using printers that I don't have here, 4) other reasonably good
3rd party components.  For applications that don't require all that,
Ada is wonderful. 


Al