Developing Object-Oriented User Interfaces in Ada With the X Window System

The graphical user interface has been accepted as being one of the most important parts of user interactive software projects. Until:ecen'.ly, however, the design and implementation of such interfaces in Ada was a long and.difficult process. A solution to this problem was found with the introduction of the X Window System in the mid 1980's. These C libraries make it relatively easy to construct sophisticated user interfaces. In the last couple of years, several organizations have developed bindings to, or implementations of, the X Window System software for use in Ada programs. This paper discusses these efforts in general and concentrates on two sets of bindings that were used in the development of a graphical user interface for a computer wargame.