Conference announcements
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From: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be> Subject: Ada at FOSDEM 2011 - video and slides available To: ada-belgium@cs.kuleuven.be Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 22:56:02 +0100 (CET) Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2011 09:51:48 +0100 (CET) (update)
On Sunday February 6 at FOSDEM 2011, Ludovic Brenta and Miguel Telleria de Esteban gave a 1.5-hour talk about Ada. The video is online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3HvUH4fJPM&p=AC607424229CFC1A.
The slides for both parts of the talk are available here:
The Debian package for MAST has been uploaded as well. MAST is a schedulability and time-completion analysis tool for real-time systems, developed at the CTR-lab of the University of Cantabria, Spain.
Enjoy!
The FOSDEM Team of Ada-Belgium
From: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be> Subject: Ada at FOSDEM 2011 To: ada-belgium@cs.kuleuven.be Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 23:08:39 +0100 (CET)
Ada-Belgium is pleased to announce that, after all, there will be some Ada at the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM 2011) on 5-6 February 2011 in Brussels, Belgium.
As our proposal for another dedicated Ada DevRoom didn't make it this year (see below), two of "our" speakers submitted a joint presentation for the CrossDistro DevRoom, which was accepted. Their talk, entitled "Ada in Debian and Other Distributions", got a 1.5 hour time slot on Sunday morning, 6 Feb 2011, in this large DevRoom with a capacity for 200 participants.
More information follows; some of it was extracted from the FOSDEM 2011 site at http://www.fosdem.org/2011/schedule/event/distro_ada.
The FOSDEM Team of Ada-Belgium
Day Sunday | Room H.1302 Start time 09:00 | Capacity 200 End time 10:30 | Track CrossDistro devroom Duration 01:30
This talk will:
Followed by a live demonstration.
Ludovic Brenta has been programming since 1989 and using GNU/Linux since
1994.
He graduated from INSA Lyon in industrial engineering in 1996 and
has been a software engineer ever since. In 2002, dissatisfied with the
languages he used, he started looking for safer alternatives and
discovered Ada, which he taught himself with help from the Free Software
community. He started giving back in 2003 when he adopted most of the
Ada packages in Debian and has been an official Debian Developer since
2006.
Miguel Telleria de Esteban is a Free Software engineer, Ph.D student
and computer science researcher from the Cantabria region in the north
of Spain.
He started using Debian GNU/Linux in 2002 and keeps collaborating ever
since with Linux User Groups
BxLUG (Brussels) and
Linuca (Cantabria region, Spain).
He discovered Ada in 1998 through the lectures of Prof. Michael Gonzalez
Harbour in Cantabria and pursuited it a year later with the Software
Engineering course of Prof. Alfred Strohmeier's lab at the EPFL. After
a 5 year period of IT consulting work in Brussels (where he discovered
Free Software), he returned to the
University of Cantabria
to start a research career on Real-Time systems in the same lab where he
was taught Ada for the first time.
From: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be> Subject: Again NO Ada at FOSDEM (was: Call for speakers for Ada at FOSDEM 2011) To: ada-belgium@cs.kuleuven.be Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 23:42:10 +0200 (MEST) [...] This is a short status report on what has happened since we posted the appended Call for Speakers earlier this month. Based on the feedback we received, we prepared a detailed proposal for an Ada Developer Room during both days of FOSDEM 2011 next February. Our proposal, including the full list of presentations and speakers, is available on the Ada at FOSDEM 2011 web-page at http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/11/110205-fosdem.html Unfortunately, earlier today Valentine wrote to the AdaFOSDEM mailing list: "Hi all bad news ... they did not send a mail to say our request was rejected.... but as far as i can read ... :/ http://www.fosdem.org/2011/news/accepted-devrooms" The list of accepted DevRooms does not include Ada, so after very successful and well attended Ada DevRooms in 2006 and 2009, we once more didn't make it for 2011. Thanks again, everybody involved with the proposal this year. Maybe we should reconsider and start looking for another event than FOSDEM for next year... Valentine, Ludovic, Dirk The FOSDEM Team of Ada-Belgium [ Quoted from a later message sent by the FOSDEM organizer's: -- dc ] Unfortunately the Ada devroom proposal was not selected. You might have discovered this indirectly already, we are very sorry for that. Something went wrong in the sending of the decline-mails, we did not wish for this to happen in this way. You submitted a very strong proposal this year, and it was one of the hardest to decide on, taking most discussions of all. We understand you might be disappointed and upset, for example when looking at some of the proposals that did get accepted. However, deciding on the devrooms is more than just selecting which projects to accept. We have a number of rooms available of sizes ranging from 31 to 200 seats, with everything in between. Accepting devrooms is also deciding in which rooms to put them, for example every year there is only one project that we can actually put in the 31 seat room. Ada has successfully organized devrooms at FOSDEM before, with great interest from our visitors. This means that Ada was competing for the mid-to-larger rooms available. This year we received a great number of collaborative proposals that are not centered around one project, but around a topic such as accessibility, open source telephony, virtualisation etc. While keeping our established rooms like embedded, crossdistro and crossdesktop, we wanted to give these new concepts a chance, which meant that there was no sufficiently sized room available for the Ada proposal. We hope you can understand our reasoning and wish you all the best, On behalf of the FOSDEM devroom team, [ End of quote ] ----- Forwarded message from Ludovic Brenta ----- From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Call for speakers for Ada at FOSDEM 2011; deadline on 2010-10-16! Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 02:28:49 -0700 (PDT) [ 35 lines deleted; see original version below -- dc ]
Ada-Belgium made a proposal for a Developer Room to hold presentations on Ada and related technologies at the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM 2011) on 5-6 February 2011 in Brussels, Belgium.
In addition to the PDF version referred to above, the full proposal we sent to the FOSDEM organizers is also included below.
The FOSDEM Team of Ada-Belgium
![[Ada coin]](110205-fosdem/strong_typing.png)
Ada-Belgium requests a Developer Room to hold presentations on related projects and tools.
As we really enjoyed the 2-full-day Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2009 and as we had no opportunity to participate to FOSDEM 2010, we submit a new Developer Room Request for FOSDEM 2011.
Some of the good news in the Ada world today, is given by the TIOBE Programming Community Index. This language gained in importance in 2010, as it saw its rank jumping from 29th to 17th. On the open source Transparent Language Popularity Index, Ada even reaches the 11th place in the category of general-purpose and compiled languages.
Our application is once again a collaborative project, mixing nationalities of speakers, offering a general overview of the uses of Ada and giving a place to very various topics. Moreover, during the lunch break on Sunday after the presentation on GtkAda programming, we plan to organize a one-hour workshop to let participants have some hands-on experience.
The 11 talks we are presenting in these pages, and the workshop, would be enough to fill a DevRoom for the entire duration of the FOSDEM event (i.e. Saturday 5th from 14:00 to 19:00 and Sunday 6th from 10:00 to 17:00).
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming http://www.adaic.com http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/06/060226-fosdem.html
Saturday
14:00-15:00 Jean-Pierre Rosen An Introduction to Ada 2005 and Ada 2012 15:00-16:00 Jean-Pierre Rosen High Reliability Programming: When Failure Is Not an Option 16:00-17:00 Thomas Quinot Couverture: Next Generation Coverage Analysis for Safety-Critical Applications 17:00-18:00 Thomas Quinot Programming LEGO MINDSTORMS Robots in Ada (+ live demo) 18:00-19:00 engineer from AdaCore SPARK: Free Language and Toolset for High-Assurance Software
Sunday
10:00-11:00 Jacob Sparre Andersen POSIX in Ada 11:00-12:00 Ludovic Brenta 30 Years of Multicore Programming with Ada 12:00-13:00 Miguel Telleria GtkAda programming - Live Performance 13:00-14:00 lunch break hands-on GtkAda programming 14:00-15:00 Ludovic Brenta Ada in Debian 15:00-16:00 Miguel Telleria Ada Debian packaging - Live Performance 16:00-17:00 Xavier Grave Lovelace: an Ada OS
Backup Presentation
David Sauvage Ada on Rails
This presentation exposes the main features of the Ada language, with special emphasis on the features that make it especially attractive for free software development. It addresses also how Ada handles the object oriented paradigm, and especially how its model is different from what is commonly found in other languages, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of this original approach.
http://www.adalog.fr/compo2.htm (free Software from Adalog)
http://adaic.org/standar/95rat/RAThtml/rat95-p2-4.html
http://adaic.org/standar/05rat/html/Rat-2.html
http://adaic.org/standar/05rat/html/Rat-TOC.html
http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html
It is common that software is a critical part of the safety of
airplanes, trains, nuclear plants... There is no place for bugs in such
systems, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that Ada is most succesful
in that area.
This talk introduces the constraints, methods and standards used for
developping such systems. It is intended to give an overview of a
different way of developping software, where 99.999% reliability is
considered unacceptably unreliable!
The techniques presented here are of use even for casual programming,
especially given the current effort for developping a free toolset for
high integrity development, which is presented at the end of the talk.
Project Couverture aims at producing a free software coverage analysis
tool suite, together with the ability to generate artifacts that allow
the tools to be used for safety-critical software projects undergoing
formal certification, such as the DO178B software audit process. The
tools will also be usable in a more general context for
non-safety-critical projects, thus benefitting the open source community
at large.
Unlike traditional coverage analysis tools requiring source code
instrumentation, the key contribution of Couverture consists in
providing unobstrusive coverage assessment by leveraging recent advances
in hardware virtualization. Native target code is executed in an
instrumented simulation environment where traces are collected. These
traces are then analyzed off-line to determine whether a given coverage
objective is achieved by the executed tests.
This presentation introduces the context of Couverture. We describe the
various open source technologies used in the project, as well as the new
tools specifically developed in the context of the project. We show how
these tools can be applied to both safety-critical software in DO-178B
context and non-safety-critical open source applications.
GNAT for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT is a GPL port for the GNAT compilation
system to the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotic platform. Originally born as
an education-oriented project at MIT Media Lab, the LEGO MINDSTORMS has
evolved into a successful commercial product for education in robotics
in a multitude of universities and high schools across the globe. The
latest revision of the platform includes a 32 bits processor and
supports several different sensors able to detect distance, colors and
sounds and to communicate via the Bluetooth protocol.
GNAT GPL Edition for the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT platform brings the
possibility of experimenting with embedded systems development using the
Ada 2005 and SPARK languages to an education-oriented robotic platform.
Entire embedded systems, including software, hardware and sensors
interfacing, and wireless communications can be developed and verified
using the GPL editions of GNAT and SPARK.
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/mindstorms http://mindstorms.lego.com
The SPARK Language takes a radical step away from contemporary
programming language design. The primary design goal is the provision
of a sound verification framework and toolsuite which renders many
common defects simply impossible or at least sure to be detected. The
SPARK language embodies a stictly defined and enforced subset of Ada
complemented by an expressive system of contracts that precisely convey
the design or the specification of the program itself.
This talk will give an introduction to the SPARK programming language
and SPARK GPL toolset.
(To be confirmed)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/spark-gpl-edition
A quick tour of systems programming and low-level network programming
using the POSIX Ada API implementation Florist and GNAT.Sockets.
Some of the topics I will cover are files, pipes and I/O, memory maps
and shared memory, memory locking, user and group database, TCP and UDP
sockets, and running external programs. The tour will include examples,
simple implementations of Unix comman, and a working HTTP server.
A simple presentation of Ada's features in this parallel/multicore area, given in such a way that it offers enough for people to start experimenting and doing "interesting stuff".
GtkAda is a binding of the GTK+ toolkit system to the Ada language. In this slot we will present a hands-on procedure of developping and building a simple graphical application easily (Solitaire Peg game). Besides building a graphical application easy, we will show how the Ada language allows mapping the Glib/GTK+ dynamic signal emitting mechanism in an elegant strong-typed way.
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common
cause to create a free operating system. The development processes are
open to the public and anyone can contribute. The strict Debian Free
Software Guidelines are the basis of the Open Source Definition. The
resulting operating system consists of tens of thousands of Free
Software packages and is renowned for its reliability, thanks to
Debian's extensive quality assurance policy. Debian GNU/Linux supports
12 hardware architectures and 4 more are in various stages of
development. Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/NetBSD and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
are works in progress. Several other distributions use Debian as their
foundation.
Ludovic Brenta will explain his work as the principal maintainer of Ada
in Debian, and the policy that unites all Ada packages, thereby making
Debian the best free Ada development platform in the world.
Following the talk "Ada in Debian", we will show a real case of packaging an Ada Free Software application following the Debian Ada policy. You will learn the role of a packager and how we benefit from the capability of Ada compilers (e.g. Gnatmake) to solve compilation dependencies.
Lovelace is a project to make a complete, secure, real-time operating
system written in Ada 2005.
The main goal is to provide a full OS with build-in Ada task semantic,
full Ada annexes compliant, and with a POSIX 1003.5 API.
This talk will present some of the work done in the project and what
can be learned about the GNAT internals from such developments.
Ada on Rails is an Ada framework and tools environment that enables you
to do web applications development.
Characteristics: rapid application development, agile friendly, safe &
secure, ready for formal method through SPARK Ada, low code, memory and
CPU footprint, range from bareboard to large scaled distributed SOA
applications.
A demo is included in the presentation.
Jean-Pierre Rosen graduated from ENST (French engineering school) in
1975, and obtained PhD in 1986. He started as a software engineer at
the computing center of ENST, then as Professor, where he was
responsible for the teaching of Software Engineering and Ada. He has
formed Adalog, a company specialized in high level training,
consultancy, and software development in the fields of Ada and
associated technologies (software engineering, object oriented
methodologies).
Jean-Pierre Rosen is Chairman of the AFNOR (French standardization body)
group for Ada, and a member of the ARG (Ada Rapporteur Group), the group
of experts in charge of maintenance and evolution of the Ada language.
He was a member of the expert team who controlled the development of the
validation suite for Ada 95.
He is the author of "Methodes de Genie Logiciel avec Ada 95" (Software
Engineering Methods with Ada 95) and "HOOD: an Industrial Approach for
Software Development".
Thomas Quinot holds an engineering degree from Telecom Paris and a PhD from Universite Paris VI. The main contribution of his research work is the definition of a flexible middleware architecture aiming at interoperability across distribution models. He is now a Senior Software Engineer with AdaCore, a leading provider of tools and solutions for embedded, real-time and criticial systems, where he is responsible for the distribution technologies.
Jacob Sparre Andersen holds a Ph.D. in experimental physics from the
Niels Bohr Institute.
After his Ph.D. he has worked in bioinformatics, taught physics,
statistics and software engineering, and worked in an investment bank.
His current activities include teaching physics of complex systems,
modelling bankruptcy avalanches, innovating for the computer gaming
industry, developing an automated data mining system for travel blogs
-- and using Ada on Unix systems.
Miguel Telleria de Esteban is a Free Software engineer, Ph.D student
and computer science researcher from the Cantabria region in the north
of Spain.
He started using Debian GNU/Linux in 2002 and keeps collaborating ever
since with Linux User Groups
BxLUG (Brussels) and
Linuca (Cantabria region, Spain).
He discovered Ada in 1998 through the lectures of Prof Michael Gonzalez
Harbour in Cantabria and pursuited it a year later with the Software
Engineering course of Prof. Alfred Strohmeier's lab at the EPFL. After
a 5 year period of IT consulting work in Brussels (where he discovered
Free Software), he returned to the
University of Cantabria
to start a research career on Real-Time systems in the same lab where he
was taught Ada for the first time.
Ludovic Brenta has been programming since 1989 and using GNU/Linux since 1994. He graduated from INSA Lyon in industrial engineering in 1996 and has been a software engineer ever since. In 2002, dissatisfied with the languages he used, he started looking for safer alternatives and discovered Ada, which he taught himself with help from the Free Software community. He started giving back in 2003 when he adopted most of the Ada packages in Debian and has been an official Debian Developer since 2006.
Xavier Grave got his PhD in theoretical physics in 1997 but learned programming by himself as early as 1984 and learned Ada with GNAT and the Lovelace tutorial in 1997. The following year, he joined the CNRS, where he is now developing a highly distributed acquisition system: NARVAL.
David Sauvage graduated from ESME Sudria (French engineering school) in 2004. He started as a software engineer at Thales, where he discovered Ada. Working on tactical data link product lines, he then became an Agile Architect. In 2010, he formed AdaLabs (http://adalabs.com), a company specialized in Ada based technologies, located in Mauritius, also empowering open source and sustainable development. David started using Debian GNU/Linux in 1999, and launched the GNU Go Ada Initiative (http://gnugoada.info) in 2010.
From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Call for speakers for Ada at FOSDEM 2011; deadline on 2010-10-16! Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 02:28:49 -0700 (PDT) The next FOSDEM[1], the Free and Open-Source European Developers' Meeting, will take place on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 February 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. The event is entirely free; speakers and attendees alike are unpaid but enthusiastic volunteers. The audience consists mostly of fellow developers. FOSDEM is one of the major events giving visibility to worthy projects and languages. Ada-Belgium organized two very successful series of presentations at FOSDEM 2006[2] and FOSDEM 2009[3], earning a good reputation for reliability and quality, and is now seeking speakers for FOSDEM 2011. Two speakers have already volunteered. [1] http://www.fosdem.org [2] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/06/060226-fosdem.html [3] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html For several years now, Ada-Belgium has been running a dedicated mailing list for the coordination of Ada at FOSDEM [4]. If you would like to be a speaker or just attend the event, please subscribe to this mailing list and peruse the archives; traffic is low and the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely high :) We can discuss accommodation and catering issues as well as technical ones on this list. A proposal should consist of a 10-line summary of the presentation, a 10-line biography of the speaker and an optional small picture (in JPEG or PNG) of the speaker. The deadline for the submission of proposals for a Developers' Room at FOSDEM is ten (10) days from now on October 16, 2010 [5]. If you would like to be a speaker, please react now on the adafosdem list so we can arrange for a joint proposal for all Adaists. [4] http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.be/archives/adafosdem.html [5] http://www.fosdem.org/2011/call_for_mainspeakers_devrooms -- Ludovic Brenta.
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Last update: 2011/02/12.
Dirk Craeynest