Tutorial: Writing Desktop Graphical User Interfaces in Ada

Gautier de Montmollin, Ada-Switzerland, Switzerland

With all the focus on embedded systems, safety-critical systems, and large systems as "the" deployment area for the Ada language, we tend too often to forget its general-purpose nature and the availability of usable open-source libraries for creating "normal" applications such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). In this tutorial, we show some examples of desktop applications of various sizes deployed in the real world and explain the underlying programming techniques for mastering Graphical User Interfaces, with specific subtleties of Ada regarding Object-Orientation. The programming framework demonstrated is GWindows, but the principles are similar in various other GUI frameworks for or in Ada and can thus be easily adapted.

Presentation topics

• Landscape of open-source Ada frameworks for Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
• Examples of GUIs written in Ada, proprietary or public; live demos for the latter
• Run-time and real-time considerations for writing good GUIs
• Object-Orientation in action

Duration: half-day

Level: Introductory

Reason for attending

Discover the use of Ada in a domain it is not well known for.

Presenter

Gautier de Montmollin is a software developer. He holds a PhD in mathematics from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His quest for both run time and development time efficiency has trapped him with the Ada language which he has the luck to use professionally (formerly in finance, now in robotics) and for private projects as well. He has presented professional and private projects at various Ada-Europe and FOSDEM conferences.