Conference announcements
![[FOSDEM logo]](/~dirk/.image/going-to-fosdem.png)
![[Ada-Belgium logo]](/~dirk/.image/ada-belgium-color-small.gif)
![[Ada coin]](120204-fosdem/strong_typing.png)
The Free and Open-Source Developers' Meeting
(FOSDEM)
is an annual event held in Brussels, Belgium, in February.
The 2012 edition will take place on Saturday the 4th and Sunday the 5th
of February.
Ada-Belgium
has organized a series of presentations related to
Ada, to be held in a dedicated
Developer Room, on the first day of the event.
Ada is a general-purpose language originally designed for safety- and mission-critical software engineering. It is used extensively in air traffic control, rail transportation, aerospace, nuclear, financial services and medical devices. The new Ada 2012 standard is being finalized and is expected to be published by ISO later this year. As with the Ada 1995 and Ada 2005 standards, the new Ada 2012 standard already starts to spread thanks to the advent of its first full implementation which is none other than the GNU Compiler Collection (GNAT).
![[In Cooperation with Ada-Europe]](/~dirk/.image/ICWAE.png)
This DevRoom aims to present the possibilities offered by the Ada Language (object-oriented, multi-core, embedded programming) as well as some of the many exciting projects using Ada.
The closing speaker of the Ada DevRoom, Robert Dewar (CEO of AdaCore), is also presenting the opening keynote of FOSDEM 2012. In order to give everyone the possibility to attend his keynote, the DevRoom is scheduled to start afterwards.
This talk will discuss our experience at AdaCore, one of only a handful of 100% Free Software companies. All of our commercial products are licensed under the GPL and other Free Software Licenses. People often assume that there is a conflict between the use of such licenses and the needs of a commercial software company. Our experience at AdaCore shows that on the contrary, the Free Software model can be very successful both for us as a company and for our customers. We think this model can be used in many other circumstances, and want to encourage free software enthusiasts to consider this model in other circumstances.
More information:
http://fosdem.org/2012/interview/robert-dewar (FOSDEM interview with Robert Dewar)
Welcome to the Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012, which is organized by Ada-Belgium in cooperation with Ada-Europe.
Ada-Belgium and Ada-Europe are both non-profit organizations set
to promote the use of Ada, and to disseminate the knowledge of it
into academic, research and industrial establishments in Belgium and
Europe, resp. Ada-Europe has member-organizations, such as Ada-Belgium,
in various countries.
More information on this event is available on the Ada-Belgium web-site
(see link).
More information:
"Welcome & Ada-Europe info", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 60KB (info sheet)
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/12/120204-fosdem.html (Ada DevRoom home-page)
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/ (Ada-Belgium home-page)
http://www.ada-europe.org/ (Ada-Europe home-page)
Overview of the main features of the Ada language, with special emphasis on those features that make it especially attractive for free software development.
Ada is a feature-rich language, but what really makes Ada stand-out is that the features are nicely integrated towards serving the goals of software engineering. If you prefer to spend your time on designing elegant solutions rather than on low-level debugging, if you think that software should not fail, if you like to build programs from readily available components that you can trust, you should really consider Ada!
More information:
"Introduction to Ada", FOSDEM'2012, ODP, 3724KB (slides)
"Introduction to Ada", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 996KB (slides)
http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html (Ada 2012 reference manual)
http://www.adaic.org/ada-resources/standards/ada05/ (Ada 2005 reference manual & rationale)
http://www.adaic.org/ada-resources/standards/ (Ada standards documents)
http://www.adalog.fr/compo2.htm (free software from Adalog)
Using Ada to provide business logic, and glue existing applications together.
The children's game universe "Crimeville" from the game developers
Art of Crime challenges the players to solve detective riddles
cooperatively. In the on-line version of the game this means that
the players in each session of the game can chat with each other.
To help the children write better - and to limit them being naughty -
the chat is going through a language server written in Ada.
The language server uses pre-existing Open Source spell-checking
components glued together with application logic written in Ada.
The application is a nice example of a small network server and of
using parts of the POSIX Ada API (FLORIST).
The presentation will cover the requirements from Art of Crime in broad
terms, describe how this was achieved using publicly available Open
Source components, and how using Ada helped convincing the customer
that the system actually does its job.
More information:
"Ada in the on-line multi-user game Crimeville", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 768KB (slides)
http://www.jacob-sparre.dk/spelling/crimeville.zip (source code)
The basics of programming by contracts and how contracts were introduced in Ada 2012.
Ada 2005 already had assertions. The notion was considerably extended in Ada 2012, with pre- and post-conditions and type invariants. Together with other properties of the language that separate clearly interfaces from implementations, these new features provide an accurate description of the obligations and expectations of the user and of the provider of software components.
More information:
"The contract model of Ada 2012", FOSDEM'2012, ODP, 232KB (slides)
"The contract model of Ada 2012", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 296KB (slides)
http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/12rm/html/RM-13-3-1.html (Aspect Specifications in Ada 2012 RM)
A presentation of Ada's features in the parallel/multicore area, given in such a way that people can start experimenting and doing "interesting stuff".
Ada had built-in support for parallel programming from the start,
and the successive standards keep improving that support, up to
most recently for the new multiprocessor architectures.
An overview of the support that already existed in Ada 83 and Ada 95
will be given, with practical examples so participants can try out
some simple things first.
Ada 2012 comes with interesting additions for using multiprocessors
effectively. Embedded systems can use an extension of the Ravenscar
profile to achieve analyzable real-time behavior on multicore
platforms. Ada's dispatching domains achieve flexible allocation
schemes for high-performance computing.
More information:
"Multicore programming support in Ada", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 836KB (slides)
http://www.adaic.org/whyada/multicore.html (Ada and multicore)
OS Lovelace: a distributed operating system in Ada, or how to have fun with both Ada and Operating System Development at the same time.
OS Lovelace already implements the basics of system programming and Ada
run-time: interrupts (x86 and ARM), virtual memory management (x86 and
ARM), elf module loading (x86 and ARM), context switching (x86), Ada
exception in kernel (x86), Ada tasking in kernel (x86), Object Oriented
programming in kernel (x86).
The final proposed architecture for a real OS based on these trial
developments will also be presented and so the method to obtain a
distributed OS that support Ada Annex E natively.
More information:
"Building OS-Lovelace a Distributed Ada Operating System", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 244KB (slides)
http://www.ada-france.org:8081/branch/changes/org.os-lovelace (Lovelace project directory)
http://www.ada-france.org:8081/branch/changes/org.os-lovelace.tutorial (Lovelace tutorial directory)
Programming Arduinos made even easier (and more reliable).
An introduction to programming Arduinos and compatible ATMEL based devices in Ada. The talk will give a short explanation of how you can set up an Ada development environment for Arduinos, followed by some real-life code and devices, demonstrating some of the elegance you can get from using Ada for programming embedded systems.
More information:
"Programming Arduinos in Ada", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 22788KB (slides)
This presentation explains and demonstrates how Ada is effectively used to control a Segway-like self-balancing robot.
LEGO MINDSTORMS are affordable and attractive robotics kits that can be used as teaching material, or as funny and interesting hobby. We have used this kit to design a Segway-like robot, where the control system is written in Ada and built with the GNAT compiler. The concurrency and real-time capabilities of the Ada Ravenscar profile are used to implement the dynamic interaction with the physical environment, respecting very stringent timing constraints.
More information:
"Programming LEGO MINDSTORMS robots in Ada", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 544KB (slides)
"LEGO Segway" on the "LEGO Punk" blog (a participant's report about this Ada DevRoom presentation)
"Self Balancing LEGO Robot" in Ada on YouTube (short video of the Segway-like robot)
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/mindstorms (GNAT GPL for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT)
http://mindstorms.lego.com (LEGO MINDSTORMS)
Discover how Ada catches up with web application development.
Ada on Rails is a bleeding edge Ada tooled framework environment that
enables web applications development. The goal of Ada on Rails is to
efficiently use all the strength of the Ada based technologies in web
applications, while being: Rapid Application Development compatible;
agile friendly; safe and secure; ready for formal method through
SPARK Ada; low code, memory and CPU footprint; range from bareboard
to large scaled distributed SOA applications.
The presentation includes a live demo.
More information:
"Ada on Rails", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 188KB (slides)
http://www.adaonrails.com (Ada on Rails)
Ada enters into the peer-to-peer world.
Peer-to-peer technologies have became commons nowadays. Initially developed for file sharing, the peer-to-peer approach is moving into the more challenging field of streaming. PPETP is a peer-to-peer streaming protocol, developed at the University of Udine, initially designed for streaming live material to large user communities and evolved with time into an efficient, generic overlay multicast protocol with many built-in features (e.g., signatures, NAT traversal, robustness, priority classes) that make it practical. After few years of development, adjustments and optimizations, PPETP is finally getting ready for its first public release. Its official specs are published as an Internet Draft, while its reference implementation is an open source Ada library (~1.5 Mbyte of source code) designed to be used, in the most common cases, with an interface similar to the well-known BSD socket interface. In this talk, after a brief overview of the most interesting characteristics of PPETP, we will discuss some of the most challenging aspects in its implementation and how Ada was instrumental to solve them.
More information:
"PPETP: a P2P streaming protocol implemented in Ada", FOSDEM'2012, PDF, 1572KB (slides)
http://corallo.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge project page)
Looking into the future of Ada, not just as a programming language but as a basis for building highly reliable software.
Ada is a language that is used for the construction of large critical
programs, including safety-critical programs where an error can cost
human lives. In looking into the future of Ada, we are doing more
than just thinking about details of programming language design, we
are really thinking about the whole issue of how to build reliable
applications in a society which depends more and more on complex
software. Ada is an interesting language precisely in that its
development has been open from the start (it is one of the very few
ISO standardized languages where you can get the ISO standard free,
we insisted on that!) And the primary implementation of Ada these
days is the GNAT system, which is 100% Free Software.
The Chevy Volt automobile has over 10 million lines of embedded code,
more than the 8 million lines aboard a Boeing 787. Many times a
day we place our lives at the mercy of complex software. How can we
be sure this software will not let us down and kill us? This is not
just a theoretical question, patients have already died at the hands
of incorrectly programmed medical devices, and although no one has
died from a bug in commercial aviation, we have had some horrifying
close calls. Things are going to get worse and worse if we don't
figure out how to deal with this situation.
Informal discussions, revisiting topics of today's presentations, etc.
Robert Dewar has been involved in programming language design and
implementation since the late 60's (working on Algol-68, SNOBOL-4
(SPITBOL), COBOL, and since the early 80's on Ada). He was a professor
of computer science first at Illinois Institute of Technology from
1968 to 1975, and then at the Courant Institute at New York University
from 1976 to 2005.
In 1994, with Ed Schonberg and Richard Kenner, he founded AdaCore,
of which he is now President and CEO. This is a 100% Free Software
company devoted to building tools for reliable software (in particular
safety-critical and security-critial software) based on the use of
the Ada language and related technologies. AdaCore's implementation
of Ada, GNAT, is part of the GCC system.
Robert Dewar is co-author of the Java-in-education article that was
"slashdotted" a few years ago.
Dirk Craeynest has been involved with the Ada programming language and
related technology since more than 3 decades. After obtaining degrees
in mathematics and computer science, he was involved in research and
teaching at the Computer Science Department of the Leuven university.
Since 1995, he works mainly on large Ada-related software projects in
industry.
Dirk is co-founder and President of the Ada-Belgium Organization,
Vice-President of Ada-Europe (federation of national Ada organizations),
Editorial Board member of the quarterly Ada User Journal, member of
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG9 (working group managing the Ada programming
language standard), and officer in the Executive Committee of ACM
SIGAda (ACM's Special Interest Group in Ada). He is involved in the
organization of several annual international events, such as
Ada-Europe's Conferences on Reliable Software Technologies and
ACM SIGAda's Conferences on Ada and Related Technologies.
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".
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 creating measurement tools for helping
professional golfers to become even better, modelling bankruptcy
avalanches, innovating for the computer gaming industry -- and putting
Ada programs inside LEGO models.
Jacob has his own consulting company --
Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
-- and is a co-founder of
AdaHeads K/S.
Dr. José F. Ruiz is a Senior Software Engineer who joined AdaCore in 2002. He received his Ph.D. Degree from the Technical University of Madrid for his work in the field of real-time and multimedia systems, including scheduling policies and resource management in operating systems. He is a specialist in embedded real-time high-integrity systems in Ada, an area where he has been working for more than 15 years, having authored/coauthored over 30 papers in those domains.
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 in Ada a highly distributed acquisition system: NARVAL. In 2005 he started translating SOS (Simple Operating System) into Ada and extending it to a full distributed operating system. He is also active in the Ada-France association.
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 software architect. In 2010, he formed AdaLabs Ltd (http://adalabs.com/), a company specialized in Ada based technologies and services, 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.
Riccardo Bernardini was born in Genova in 1964. He is an Aggregate Professor in telecommunications and signal processing at the University of Udine, Italy. After graduating, he began working in the field of digital signal processing, especially fast algorithms for multidimensional signals, filter banks, wavelets and signal compression. Although still a signal-processing-guy, recently he began working also on networking, especially on multimedia streaming over peer-to-peer networks. His research activity brought to the development of PPETP, a peer-to-peer streaming protocol documented in an Internet-Draft and implemented in Ada. He has approximately 100 publications including international conferences and scientific journals.
Ada Developer Room on LinkedIn site (+ attendance indicator)
A one-page preliminary call for participation [1] is available. It can be used to help announcing the event. [1] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/12/120204-fosdem-cfpart.pdf
From: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be> Subject: Ada-Europe grants "in cooperation" status to Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2012 To: AdaFOSDEM@listserv.cc.kuleuven.be Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:38:50 +0100 (CET) I'm pleased to announce that the Ada-Europe Board [1] decided to grant "in cooperation" status to our 3rd Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012. This was granted as well for our previous Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2009 [2]. We can now include "Organized in cooperation with Ada-Europe" in all announcements and web-pages, and use the distribution channels of Ada-Europe to give wider visibility to the event. The latter includes having a one-page announcement in the December issue of the Ada User Journal [3] and distributing a Call for Participation to the appropriate Ada-Europe mailing list (probably) early January. [...] Dirk Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be (for Ada-Belgium/-Europe/SIGAda/WG9 mail) [1] http://www.ada-europe.org/ [2] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html [3] http://www.ada-europe.org/journal.html
From: dirk@vana.cs.kuleuven.be. (Dirk Craeynest)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,fr.comp.lang.ada
Subject: Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:03:41 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Ada-Belgium, c/o Dept. of Computer Science, K.U.Leuven
Summary: Plan now to attend!
Keywords: Ada,open source,free software,technical presentations,FOSDEM
This announcement is distributed to various Ada-related mailing lists
and newsgroups. As FOSDEM is an international event, we're interested
in feedback and suggestions from all forums. Thanks for any help!
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Preliminary Announcement
3rd Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012
4 February 2012, Brussels, Belgium
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/12/120204-fosdem.html
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We are pleased to announce that there will be a one-day Ada Developer
Room on Saturday 4 February 2012 at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, Belgium.
FOSDEM [1], the Free and Open source Software Developers' European
Meeting, is a free and non-commercial two-day event organized each
February in Brussels, Belgium.
The goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and
communities a place to meet with other developers and projects, to be
informed about the latest developments in the Free Software and Open
Source world, to attend interesting talks and presentations held in
large conference rooms by Free Software and Open Source project leaders
and committers on various topics, and to promote the development and
the benefits of Free Software and Open Source solutions.
At previous FOSDEM events, Ada-Belgium [2] has organized some very
well attended Ada Developer Rooms, offering a full day program in 2006
[3] and a two-day program in 2009 [4]. One of our important goals
is to present Ada also to people outside the traditional Ada community.
Our proposal for another dedicated Ada DevRoom was accepted recently,
and now work will continue to prepare the detailed program. We most
probably will have a total of 8 schedulable hours between 10:30
and 18:30. More information will be posted later on a dedicated
web-page on the Ada-Belgium site, and final announcements will of
course also be sent to various lists and newsgroups.
Although we already have many potential speakers and presentations
(see our proposal from last year [5]) Ada-Belgium calls on you to:
- inform us at ada-belgium-board@cs.kuleuven.be about specific
presentations you would like to hear in an Ada DevRoom;
- for bonus points, subscribe to the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list [6]
to discuss and help organize the details;
- for more bonus points, be a speaker: the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list
is the place to be!
We look forward to lots of feedback! Please act ASAP.
For the FOSDEM Team of Ada-Belgium,
Dirk
Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be (for Ada-Belgium/-Europe/SIGAda/WG9 mail)
[1] <http://www.fosdem.org>
[2] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/>
[3] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/06/060226-fosdem.html>
[4] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html>
[5] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/11/110205-fosdem-req.pdf>
[6] <http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.be/archives/adafosdem.html>
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To the Ada-Belgium home page.
Last update: 2012/02/07.
Dirk Craeynest