When combined with the Janus/Ada Professional Development System, the Janus/Ada Toolkit for Microsoft Windows provides the capability of writing Ada programs which are true Windows applications, interfacing with the full Windows environment. All of Ada's powerful features can be used in Windows applications, including multitasking, generic units, and exception handling.
The Toolkit provides three levels of interfaces to Microsoft Windows: At the lowest level, it provides a complete binding to the Windows 3.0 and 3.1 API. At the next level, the Toolkit provides an Ada Windows binding for most operations in an easy-to-use form that is more natural to Ada programmers than the native Microsoft Windows API. This binding uses Ada features like enumeration types, representation clauses, and default parameters to improve the interface to Windows. At the highest level, the Janus/Ada Toolkit provides complete support for the standard Ada input/output libraries, allowing existing Ada programs to be recompiled as Windows applications without any modification.

Interfaces to non-core Microsoft Windows APIs can easily be built with the extensive interface support built into the Janus/Ada compiler. Support includes calling both to and from Ada to Windows, C and C++. Data objects also can be shared between Ada and other language code.

The Toolkit provides facilities to create entire Windows Applications without writing any code in C, assembler, or the resource language. The compiler supports appropriate pragmas to generate call-back routines and to construct Windows resources. By writing the entire application in Ada, all of the advantages of Ada can be brought to bear on the job. In addition, Ada's version checking prevents mismatch of resources and code. Resources can be defined with the code that uses them, increasing modularity and reusability.

However, it does not require the entire application to be written in Ada. If it is more appropriate to construct the application with parts written in other languages, the compiler and Toolkit also support that well. The compiler's extensive interfacing facilities are particularly useful for mixed language programs.

The Toolkit can automatically construct .DEF files for Microsoft Windows Applications, possible because the Ada source code has all of the information needed to construct a definition file. Special applications can use hand constructed .DEF files (mixed Ada and C applications, for example).

The Janus/Ada Toolkit for Microsoft Windows and the Janus/Ada Professional Development System require a minimum of a 80386 machine with 2MB RAM and 8MB hard disk space. Also requires the Microsoft Windows SDK and a Microsoft compatible linker.



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