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At Xhibition '89 (SAN Jose, Calif June 25-28), I attended a lecture on an
Interactive Ada-Based Interface Builder called GRAMMI (Generated Reuseable
Ada Man Machine Interface), being developed at ESL, Inc., for use with
applications written in Ada.
These guys are actually building their own toolkit (including callbacks,
widgets, et al). User interfaces (screens) can be built by a novice X
user; by selecting screen widgets from an MMI (Man Machine Interface)
widgets parts library, dragging them into place, and filling out the
corresponding attribute form. After the screen specs are created, Ada
code that implements the screen is generated using X. The GRAMMI software
(toolkit) interfaces to X at the Xlib level utilizing the SAIC X-to-Ada
binding.
The importance of Ada and X to classified software development in many
government contracts cannot be over-emphasized. The GRAMMI architects
claim the User Interface developer need not know about a detailed working
of the 'mission application'..thus, expensive government security checks
and clearances are not required at the UI level. They claim to have
*really* separated "application form (look and feel) from function".
The "mission application" is treated as a "black-box".
I have requested more detailed material from the GRAMMI architects ....so
anybody interested may send me mail for on-ward transmission.
Kris..
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| What are MIT and X Consortium "standards"
X protocol
Xlib interface to the (client) protocol (C bindings only)
CLX (Common Lisp interface to the client protocol)
What DEC ships with VMS DECwindows
Xlib for C (MIT bindings)
Xlib for VMS bindings (ADA,BASIC,BLISS,C,FORTRAN,MACRO,PASCAL,PL/I)
What people at Xhibition wanted
As Kris pointed out the previous reply (a more natural ADA interface)
and as .0 pointed out: bindings and a new implementation of Xlib to
support parallel processing
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