From: Bob Leif
Firstly, I disagree, with Randy's statement, "The only drawback to Claw is
that you have to help us support its development :-). This is actually an
advantage. By paying reasonable prices for a commercial product and
subsequent support, one protects the investment in the software that uses
(Withs) this product. The developers have a financial incentive to keep
supporting and improving their product. RRsoftware has been one of the few
Ada companies that have had a reasonable pricing structure.

CLAW has also demonstrated that the use of Ada and excellent software
engineering to produce thick bindings results in simple, useful products.
There has been a very strong tendency amongst Ada developers to either build
clones or thin bindings to products like Microsoft Windows or X-Windows that
were created in other languages. Unfortunately, thin bindings can not hide
the design complexity which often results for the use of C and C++.

Since CLAW is a product based on a thick binding, it has the great advantage
that much of it can be ported to XML which fortunately should replace much
of Microsoft Windows.

For over 6 months, I had searched for a simple way to have an Ada program
interact with a browser both being hosted on the same PC. Thanks to Tom
Moran's Smplsrvr program, which employs CLAW technology, I have already been
able to import the output of HTML FORM GET and POST statements.

Yours, Bob Leif


-----Original Message-----
From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Randy Brukardt
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 3:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Writing graphics files


> Hi Teamers,
>         I am working on a tutorial application to teach iteration
> to CS1 classes using a graphical interface.  To achieve my aims I
> need to be able to write a graphics file to a Windows98 graphics
> window controlling its size and position in the window.  The
> format of the file doesn't matter but I am
> thinking in terms of .bmp, .gif or .jpg files.

Claw has routines to make this easy for .BMP files. We had to write them
ourselves; Win32 doesn't have any direct support for reading graphics files.
(You don't usually need to read the file in Win32 programs. If it does not
change, you should just load it as a resource. But you do need to load files
if they can change, as they do in the Claw Builder.)

We made the routines stream attributes, so they can be used for other things
as well (putting a graphic into the clipboard or the registry, for example).

The only drawback to Claw is that you have to help us support its
development :-), but we do have an inexpensive educational version
available. (The support you're looking for isn't in the free demo version,
otherwise I'd recommend that.)

Martin noted some other ways to do the job.

                                Randy Brukardt
                                R.R. Software, Inc.

Standard Disclaimer here: I'm the lead developer for Claw, so I might be
biased...but I doubt it. :-)