[gtkada] survey: what applications do you develop ?

[Bobby D. Bryant]

briot at gnat.com wrote:

> We (= the GtkAda team) were wondering what kind of applications were currently
> developed with GtkAda.

I'm using it for two things right now:

1) Graduate research in artificial intelligence.

For a lot of the things my research group does (simulated neural networks,
genetic algorithms), visualization can be very important. Right now, for
instance, I have a program churning away on the Traveling Salesman Problem, and
I'm using GtkAda to give live updates showing the best route found so far (a
Gtk.Pixmap) and various statistics such as run time, candidates examined,
parameter settings (for things like auto-annealing), etc., which are shown in
labels that are updated like odometers.

Naturally, I'll want to run my solver as a batch job when I think I have it
right, but since it is research I don't always have it right the first try, and
the visualization is very important for getting quick evaluations of what effect
a new heuristic has. GtkAda makes it easy for me, and also makes the display very
presentable for research meetings, conference slides, etc.


2) Game programming.

In my "spare" time (i.e., time stolen from something else I should be doing), I
am chipping away at creating a game of the Civilization genre.  It uses GtkAda
for all the UI, and also for some not-so-visible functions such as an "idle proc"
to manage the basic simulation, and input watches to manage messages appearing on
a socket.  [BTW, I intend to release this game as "logicels libre", if ever I
finish some basic functionality.]




> The best would be to start a list of applications.

I have also been intending to ask, should we start some kind of repository for
derived widgets?  I already have a couple of really simple ones that I could
contribute.  Nothing to brag about; just some convenience packages.  (For
example, a Labeled_Value widget that consists of two labels in the GTK sense, one
of which is e.g. a parameter name and the other is the text of its value.  A
Labeled_Value can be created with a single call and dropped into a Vbox with
others of its kind, resulting in a nice display with the parameter names left
justified in one column and the values right justified in another.  Another
function call lets you change the value of the "value" part of the widget; this
is what I use for the live action "odometers" mentioned above, as well as for a
static display of all the program parameters.)

I think such an archive would prove useful once it grew large enough to attract
widespread interest.  One big issue would be finding a way to categorize widgets
so that people could actually find what they wanted once the archive grew large.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas