Ada Web Application is a framework to build high performance secure web applications. This is a new release with 99 Debian packages ready to be installed on Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 and also Debian 10.

The Ada Wiki Engine is a small Ada library that parses a Wiki text in several Wiki syntax such as MediaWiki, Creole, Markdown and renders the result either in HTML, text or into another Wiki format. The Ada Wiki Engine is used in two steps:

1. The Wiki text is parsed according to its syntax to produce a Wiki Document instance.
2. The Wiki document is then rendered by a renderer to produce the final HTML or text.

The Ada Wiki Engine does not manage any storage for the wiki content so that it only focuses on the parsing and rendering aspects.

Overview

The Ada Wiki engine is organized in several packages:

• Several Wiki stream packages define the interface, types and operations for the Wiki

engine to read the Wiki or HTML content and for the Wiki renderer to generate the HTML or text outputs.

• The Wiki parser is responsible for parsing HTML or Wiki content according to a

selected Wiki syntax. It builds the final Wiki document through filters and plugins.

• The Wiki filters provides a simple filter framework that allows to plug specific

filters when a Wiki document is parsed and processed. Filters are used for the table of content generation, for the HTML filtering, to collect words or links and so on.

• The Wiki plugins defines the plugin interface that is used by the Wiki engine

to provide pluggable extensions in the Wiki. Plugins are used for the Wiki template support, to hide some Wiki text content when it is rendered or to interact with other systems.

• The Wiki documents and attributes are used for the representation of the Wiki

document after the Wiki content is parsed.

• The Wiki renderers are the last packages which are used for the rendering of the

Wiki document to produce the final HTML or text.

Building Ada Wiki Engine

Download the ada-wiki-1.0.1.tar.gz or get the sources from GitHub:

git clone git@github.com:stcarrez/ada-wiki.git ada-wiki

If you are using Ada Utility Library then you can configure with:

./configure

Otherwise, you should configure with:

./configure --with-ada-util=no

Then, build the library:

make

Once complete, you can install it:

make install

To use the library in your Ada project, add the following line in your GNAT project file:

with "wiki";

Rendering example

The rendering example described in this article generates an HTML or text content from a Wiki source file. The example reads the file in one of the supported Wiki syntax and produces the HTML or text. You will find the source file on GitHub in render.adb. The example has the following usage:

Render a wiki text file into HTML (default) or text
Usage: render [-t] [-m] [-M] [-d] [-c] [-s style] {wiki-file}
  -t        Render to text only
  -m        Render a Markdown wiki content
  -M        Render a Mediawiki wiki content
  -d        Render a Dotclear wiki content
  -g        Render a Google wiki content
  -c        Render a Creole wiki content
  -s style  Use the CSS style file

Parsing a Wiki Text

To render a Wiki text you will first need to parse the Wiki text and produce a Wiki document instance. For this you will need to declare the Wiki document instance and the Wiki parser instance:

with Wiki.Documents;
with Wiki.Parsers;
...
   Doc      : Wiki.Documents.Document;
   Engine   : Wiki.Parsers.Parser;

The Ada Wiki Engine has a filter mechanism that is used while parsing the input and before building the target wiki document instance. Filters are chained together and a filter can do some work on the content it sees such as blocking some content (filtering), collecting some data and doing some transformation on the content. When you want to use a filter, you have to declare an instance of the corresponding filter type.

with Wiki.Filters.Html;
with Wiki.Filters.Autolink;
with Wiki.Filters.TOC;
...
   Filter   : aliased Wiki.Filters.Html.Html_Filter_Type;
   Autolink : aliased Wiki.Filters.Autolink.Autolink_Filter;
   TOC      : aliased Wiki.Filters.TOC.TOC_Filter;

We use the Autolink filter that detects links in the text and transforms them into real links. The TOC filter is used to collect header sections in the Wiki text and builds a table of content. The Html filter is used to filter HTML content that could be contained in a Wiki text. By default it ignores several HTML tags such as html, head, body, title, meta (these tags are silently discarded). Furthermore it has the ability to hide several elements such as style and script (the tag and its content is discarded).

You will then configure the Wiki engine to build the filter chain and then define the Wiki syntax that the parser must use:

Engine.Add_Filter (TOC'Unchecked_Access);
Engine.Add_Filter (Autolink'Unchecked_Access);
Engine.Add_Filter (Filter'Unchecked_Access);
Engine.Set_Syntax (Syntax);

The Wiki engine gets its input from an Input_Stream interface that only defines a Read procedure. The Ada Wiki Engine provides several implementations of that interface, one of them is based on the Ada Text_IO package. This is what we are going to use:

with Wiki.Streams.Text_IO;
...
   Input    : aliased Wiki.Streams.Text_IO.File_Input_Stream;

You will then open the input file. If the file contains UTF-8 characters, you may open it as follows:

Input.Open (File_Path, "WCEM=8");

where File_Path is a string that represents the file's path.

Once the Wiki engine is setup and the input file opened, you can parse the Wiki text and build the Wiki document:

Engine.Parse (Input'Unchecked_Access, Doc);

Rendering a Wiki Document

After parsing a Wiki text you get a Wiki.Documents.Document instance that you can use as many times as you want. To render the Wiki document, you will first choose a renderer according to the target format that you need. The Ada Wiki Engine provides three renderers:

• A Text renderer that produces text outputs,
• A HTML renderer that generates an HTML presentation for the document,
• A Wiki renderer that generates various Wiki syntaxes.

The renderer needs an output stream instance. We are using the Text_IO implementation:

with Wiki.Stream.Html.Text_IO;
with Wiki.Render.Html;
...
   Output   : aliased Wiki.Streams.Html.Text_IO.Html_File_Output_Stream;
   Renderer : aliased Wiki.Render.Html.Html_Renderer;

You will then configure the renderer to tell it the output stream to use. You may enable or not the rendering of Table Of Content and you just use the Render procedure to render the document.

Renderer.Set_Output_Stream (Output'Unchecked_Access);
Renderer.Set_Render_TOC (True);
Renderer.Render (Doc);

By default the output stream is configured to write on the standard output. This means that when Render is called, the output will be written to the standard output. You can choose another output stream or open the output stream to a file according to your needs.

Conclusion

The Ada Wiki Engine can be used to parse HTML content, sanitize the result through the HTML filter and convert it to text or to some Wiki syntax (have a look at the import.adb example). The engine can be extended through filters or plugins thus providing some flexible architecture. The library does not impose any storage mechanism. The Ada Wiki Engine is the core engine used by AWA Blogs and AWA Wiki web applications. You may have a look at some online Wiki in the Atlas Wiki demonstrator.

Ada Web Application is a framework to build web applications.

The new version of AWA provides:

• New countries plugin to provide country/region/city data models
• New settings plugin to control application user settings
• New tags plugin to easily add tags in applications
• New <awa:tagList> and <awa:tagCloud> components for tag display
• Add tags to the question and blog plugins
• Add comments to the blog post

AWA can be downloaded at http://blog.vacs.fr/vacs/download.html

A live demonstration of various features provided by AWA is available at http://demo.vacs.fr/atlas

A small tutorial explains how you can easily setup a project, design the UML model, and use the features provided by the Ada Web Application framework.

Dynamo is a code generator used to generate Ada Web Application or database mappings.

• New project template to generate Gtk Ada application
• Register the new module in the application when they are added
• Update the current testsuite when new tests are added
• New stereotype for Ada bean generation
• Support for the creation of Debian packages
• New command add-form and add-module-operation

You can download the new version at http://download.vacs.fr/dynamo/dynamo-0.7.0.tar.gz

Ada Web Application is a framework to build web applications.

• AWA uses Ada Server Faces for the web framework. This framework is using several patterns from the Java world such as Java Server Faces and Java Servlets.
• AWA provides a set of ready to use and extendable modules that are common to many web application. This includes managing the login, authentication, users, permissions.
• AWA uses an Object Relational Mapping that helps in writing Ada applications on top of MySQL or SQLite databases. The ADO framework allows to map database objects into Ada records and access them easily.
• AWA is a model driven engineering framework that allows to design the application data model using UML and generate the corresponding Ada code.

The new version of AWA provides:

• New jobs plugin to manage asynchronous jobs,
• New storage plugin to manage a storage space for application documents,
• New votes plugin to allow voting on items,
• New question plugin to provide a general purpose Q&A.

AWA can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/ada-awa/downloads/list

A live demonstration of various features provided by AWA is available at http://demo.vacs.fr/atlas

Ada Web Application is a framework to build web applications easily on top of Ada Server Faces, Ada Database Objects and Ada Web Server.

The new version of the framework provides:

• A new event framework with configurable action listeners,
• Persistent event queues for the event framework,
• A new blog module and wiki engine supporting Google Wiki, Creole, MediaWiki, phpPP and Dotclear syntax,
• New mail UI components allowing to generate and send email easily with the ASF presentation pages,
• A new Javascript plugin Markedit with jQuery Markedit (MIT License)

This new version can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/ada-awa/downloads/list (downloading the awa-all package is recommended to get the project and its dependencies).

A demo of an AWA application is available at http://demo.vacs.fr/atlas/

Ada Server Faces is an Ada implementation of several Java standard web frameworks.

• The Java Servlet (JSR 315) defines the basis for a Java application to be plugged in Web servers. It standardizes the way an HTTP request and HTTP response are represented. It defines the mechanisms by which the requests and responses are passed from the Web server to the application possibly through some additional filters.
• The Java Unified Expression Language (JSR 245) is a small expression language intended to be used in Web pages. Through the expressions, functions and methods it creates the link between the Web page template and the application data identified as beans.
• The Java Server Faces (JSR 314 and JSR 344) is a component driven framework which provides a powerful mechanism for Web applications. Web pages are represented by facelet views (XHTML files) that are modelized as components when a request comes in. A lifecycle mechanism drives the request through converters and validators triggering events that are received by the application. Navigation rules define what result view must be rendered and returned.

Ada Server Faces gives to Ada developers a strong web framework which is frequently used in Java Web applications. On their hand, Java developers could benefit from the high performance that Ada brings: apart from the language, they will use the same design patterns.

The new version of Ada Server Faces is available and brings the following changes:

• The Security packages was moved in a separate project: Ada Security,
• New demo to show OAuth and Facebook API integration,
• Integrated jQuery 1.8.3 and jQuery UI 1.9.2,
• New converter to display file sizes,
• Javascript support was added for click-to-edit behavior,
• Add support for JSF session beans,
• Add support for servlet error page customization,
• Allow navigation rules to handle exceptions raised by Ada bean actions,
• Support the JSF 2.2 conditional navigation,
• New functions fn:escapeXml and fn:replace.

The new version can be downloaded on the Ada Server Faces project page. A live demo is available at http://demo.vacs.fr/demo.

Atlas is a demonstration application implemented using the AWA framework. The Atlas application features:

• User registration through OpenID or classical email/password registration mechanisms,
• A microblog shared among all connected users,
• A blog system allowing users to post articles displayed on this public page.

This application will evolve while new AWA plugins are added.

Feel free to try this application to see and discover AWA capabilities. Connect to Atlas

Please, post only valuable content otherwise I may have to delete them without notice.

Enjoy,

Stephane

Testing for HBCS

Cost Code 1010 Appraisal $420.00