Re: GWindows and David Botton

[Fionn mac Cuimhaill <invisible@hiding.from.spam>]

On 23 Sep 2004 20:35:20 -0400, Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org>
wrote:

>Fionn mac Cuimhaill <invisible@hiding.from.spam> writes:
>
>> <snip GWindows stuff>
>> 
>> The  Gwindows/GNATCOM mailing list seems to be defunct, and I would
>> also like to find a way to organize a replacement for it.
>
>I suggest you use this newsgroup (comp.lang.ada), until it becomes
>clear that you need another forum. I, for one, would like to hear if
>Gwindows becomes a better supported and more widely used project.
>
>I'm considering giving up on GtkAda for Windows development, and
>resurrecting Windex (long story, for another thread :). But I would
>consider joining an open Gwindows project, instead. I always thought
>Windex and Gwindows should be merged.

OK, that sounds fine to me -  I will go with comp.lang.ada as a
communication medium  I have neve done anything with Sourceforge other
than download software from it. Does anyone here who might want to
work on GWindows have any experience with it? In any case, I will
investigate Sourceforge myself and see what it takes to start a new
project there.

And to get started, I would like to start laying out a roadmap of
things that need to get done.  I can think of several areas that can
stand some more work.

1. Documentation. The existing tutorial intro is a good start, but it
needs much work, as do the associated tutorial examples. For example,
there is no section in the tutorial intro about the use of radio
buttons, and there is no corresponding example program. 

Some of the examples show several variations of ways to do things,
which might be best broken up into several independent example
programs. The numbering scheme for tutorial programs needs to be
changed so that new ones can be added without renumbering all of the
later ones.

A reference manual is needed.

Documentation should be available in some form other than Word, as not
everybody has or likes it. Anybody can get a free Adobe pdf reader,
and I can easily create documents in that form. (I actually like
WordPerfect, but few use it nowadays, although it can easily produce
both pdf and html outputs.)

2. Bugs need to be identified and fixed. I hereby call for bug
reports, so that we can look to see what needs to be done.

3. Deficiencies in existing areas need to be addressed. An example
here is edit boxes. There seems to be no general way to capture
character entered into an edit box and do special handling for things
like carriage returns. In general, if Visual Basic can do something,
GWindows should be able to do the same thing.

4. Expansion areas need to be identified. Printing is important for
me. I want to do printing additions in two stages. The first level
should bring printing support up to a rough equivalent of what can be
done with Visual Basic 6, but done in a more coherent Ada way.
The second level needs to add some kind of higher-level document
abstraction. I have in mind something like the qPrinter package for
Visual Basic 6. (Google for qPrinter and you will find it
immediately.)

The existing thin binding to the Windows printing API should not be
neglected - various API functions are missing and should be added.

5. Various extensions need to be done to character string handling.
Gwindows tries to hide the difference between  character
representation among the various versions of Windows by defining a
GString to be composed of either ordinary or wide characters as
needed, and likewise tries to hide the differences between various
Windows API procedures and functions that use string arguments. This
hiding philosophy in not completely implemented and  I still need to
use a variety of Ada system packages that have both ordinary and
wide-character versions. (Typically the wide versions, as I do all of
my development on Windows 2K and XP)


I'm going to need help; I am far from being the best Ada programmer in
the world and I know little about low-level Windows API programming.
If all goes well, both of those situations will change for the better
as this project develops.