RAPID
The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by
the U.S. Air Force of these Web sites or the information, products,
or services contained therein. The U.S. Air Force does not exercise
any editorial control over the information you may find at these locations.
These links are consistent with the stated purpose of this DoD Web site.
Introduction
Welcome to the RAPID home page! RAPID is the Rapid Ada Portable Interface Design tool. Using RAPID, programmers can easily create a graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for their applications by simply drawing them. RAPID then generates Ada code using a platform independent GUI library. (Current implementations utilize either the TASH binding to Tcl/Tk or the GNAT to JVM compiler). Since these are supported on many different platforms (including Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX), the generated GUI will also run on all of these platforms.
RAPID 3.0 is now available (2 June 2000)
RAPID 3.0 includes new features for automatically filling in the values of certain widgets (Text_Entries, Check buttons and Dropdown lists), and provides new Window functions for radio buttons.
RAPID 2.2
RAPID 2.2 now includes sources for a JVM implementation in addition to the Tcl/Tk implementation, plus some bug fixes. The JVM implmentation should work with the to-be-released GNAT for JVM compiler. Future plans also include a port to GtkAda. See the GIMP project for more information on Gtk.
RAPID 2.0 is now available (9 June 1999)!
This is a total redesign of RAPID to use a new OO library which can have multiple implementations (right now only the Tcl implementation is available). It also includes new widgets (progress bar, scale widget, listbox), tooltips, better color handling, mouse handling, keystroke handling, etc. GUI files are not quite backward compatible with RAPID 1.1. One disadvantage of the new release is that GIF files are no longer built in to the executable, as I could not figure out how to do this in an implementation independent fashion.
RAPID 1.1 is here.
This includes a users' guide, implementors' guide, new widget functionality, new widgets, more robust error handling, (can double-click to open a RAPID GUI), better documented and simplified code, etc. All .GUI files are backward compatible with RAPID 1.0, so updating is a snap.RAPID is freely distributed as a service of the United States Air Force Academy Department of Computer Science. RAPID was written by Martin Carlisle and W. Blair Watkinson II.
For more information on RAPID, get our SIGAda paper (postscript file). Also, you can click here to see some screen shots of RAPID in action.
Getting Started
To use RAPID, you will need the following:- an Ada95 compiler (e.g., GNAT)
- Tcl/Tk (download Tcl/Tk 8.2 here)
- TASH binding (download here) Note: Download the zip file, unzip it, and then make sure that tash820a/src is in the compiler include path (using the GNAT flag -I), and that the libraries are in the library search path (using the GNAT flag -L).