Ada-Belgium is a non-profit volunteer organization whose purpose is to promote the use in Belgium of the Ada programming language, the first ISO standardized object-oriented language.
Ada offers commercial developers an ideal blend of consistency, maturity, reliability, and performance. Ada supports the creativity and innovation of top technical talent while providing the discipline and engineering required for critical software systems. No other language is as uniquely qualified for building viable, cost-effective, long-term software solutions. It is a choice you need to consider.We are pleased to announce that on Friday, November 28, 1997, Ada-Belgium organizes its 7th Annual Seminar at the premises of Trasys in Brussels.From: "Ada - The Language For A Complex World" (Ada Resource Association)
More information is available below and via the Ada-Belgium'97 Home Page. Here you will find:
The annual Ada-Belgium Seminar is an event not to be missed!
Do not delay to register!
(And be sure to request your FREE copies of the Ada CD-ROMs.)
Looking forward to meet many of you in Brussels.
Dirk Craeynest
Ada-Belgium Board
ada@belgium.eu.net
PS: All presentations are in English. Everyone interested is welcome.
08:30 - 09:30 Registration
09:30 - 09:35 Welcome (Ada-Belgium)
09:35 - 10:00 "From Heritage Systems to the ITDialTone"
[0h25] (on CORBA-DCE-etc. interoperability)
by Marc Laureys, The Open Group (formerly OSF & X/Open),
Belgium
10:00 - 11:15 Tutorial - Part 1:
[1h15] "CORBA and Ada 95 for High Performance Distributed
Software Components"
by Bill Beckwith, Objective Interface Systems, U.S.A.
11:15 - 11:45 Coffee break
11:45 - 13:00 Tutorial - Part 2:
[1h15] "CORBA and Ada 95 for High Performance Distributed
Software Components"
by Bill Beckwith, Objective Interface Systems, U.S.A.
13:00 - 13:15 Vendor Presentation:
[0h15] "Building Fast, Predictable Systems with Objective
Interface's ORBexpress for Ada 95 CORBA Object
Request Broker"
by Bill Beckwith, Objective Interface Systems, U.S.A.
-------------
13:15 - 14:15 Lunch
14:15 - 14:45 Coffee break
-------------
14:45 - 15:45 "An overview of DCE"
[1h00] by Yolande Berbers, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
15:45 - 16:00 Vendor Presentation:
[0h15] "OrbAda, the Top Graph'X CORBA solution"
by Bernard Maudry, Top Graph'X, France
16:00 - 16:30 Coffee break
16:30 - 17:00 Experience Report: "Building a Conceptual Object Model"
[0h30] by Kor Molenmaker, Maritime Research Institute
Netherlands (MARIN), the Netherlands
17:00 - 18:00 "Multi-Partition programming with GLADE: an overview"
[1h00] by Cyrille Comar, Ada Core Technologies (ACT) & ACT
Europe, France
18:00 End of the Seminar
Isn't technology wonderful? How often we hear that phrase - usually in a very sarcastic tone after the copier breaks down, the printer runs out of ink or our laptop battery runs out just before a big meeting. However, if you really think about it, technology is wonderful - after all, we are all making our livings trying to make it work! The problem is that we are all trying more or less as individuals and individual companies, and not as a collective group. There has to be a better way.
The Open Group is a leading industry consortium of users and vendors. Leading that better way is exactly what The Open Group is in business to do and what this presentation will be talking about. The Open Group has coined the term "The IT DialTone" to capture what we believe is needed - a common, consistent infrastructure that enables true Internet and Intranet-based business.
This presentation will give an overview of The Open Group, who we are and what we do, and why we think of ourselves as the United Nations of Information Technology. It will address the reason why all of us should be concerned with infrastructure issues, the dilemma of the attractiveness of internet-based business and the interoperability challenges that are keeping most of us from realizing the tremendous potential of internet-based business. Then the presentation will introduce the possibilities for making IT work better for all of us, what we at The Open Group call the IT DialTone. This will give you a better understanding of the role The Open Group will play in helping to bring about the IT DialTone, and how you could participate.
Description: The Ada 95 programming language is a powerful and flexible language that provides a safe environment for creating reliable software. The OMG Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a flexible environment for creating potentially distributed software components. The marriage of these two technologies results in a uniquely powerful environment for creating high performance, reliable, distributed software components. This tutorial will introduce the principles of CORBA-based architecture, and cover the development processes of a distributed object architecture based on CORBA and Ada 95.
Intended audience: Experienced Ada programmers with an interest in learning how to write distributed applications more productively, or those wishing to use CORBA technologies as a means of integrating existing applications.
Objective Interface Systems announced recently ORBexpress (TM), a new Object Request Broker (ORB) product for the Ada 95 Object-Oriented Programming community. ORBexpress is the successor to Orbix/Ada. ORBexpress is solely developed by Objective Interface, a company focused on the design and delivery of leading-edge object technology for developers using the Ada 95 language. Objective Interface is actively producing and marketing ORBexpress worldwide.
In addition, Objective Interface and IONA Technologies announced a non-exclusive global reseller agreement. Under the agreement, IONA will resell OIS' ORBexpress to IONA's customer base. The new reseller agreement replaces an existing co-development agreement and recognizes Objective Interface's strengths in Ada development.
DCE stands for Distributed Computing Environment and was built by the Open Software Foundation (OSF). The primary goal of DCE is to provide a coherent, seamless environment that can serve as a platform for running large, complex distributed applications. This environment runs on top of existing operating systems and consists of several components: a threads component, a remote procedure call component, a directory service, a security service, a time service, and optionally a file service.
The presentation will give an overview of the history, goals, concepts and models of DCE. Emphasis will be put on the remote procedure call component, the directory service and the security service. DCE, which uses a procedural programming approach, will also be contrasted to object oriented CORBA.
CORBA services and clients can be implemented in any programming language, provided that a CORBA development environment is available for use with the chosen programming language. Top Graph'X has developed OrbAda, an Ada95 ORB with the associated Ada95 development environment.
At Marin software applications are used in hydrodynamic research projects. Traditionally these applications were build vertically, containing all items from the User Interface down to the numerical algorithms. Vertically building of applications creates a lot of overhead for maintenance, there is hardly any reuse and the "wheel is invented over and over again".
To tackle these problems, development of software applications had to be changed radically to component based development. For component based development to become successful it is very crucial to create a consistent concept object model. This concept object model describes the architecture of the objects and is the baseline for development of the software applications. The concept object model is structured with hierarchical layers with components. The communication protocol between the layers is CORBA. The component interface description is done in CORBA IDL (Interface Description Language). By using the IDL to describe the interface between the components, the components itself can be implemented using the most desired programming language. This can vary between Java, Ada, C++, or FORTRAN, depending upon the component, as long as the CORBA IDL vendor supports the mapping from IDL to this language.
This presentation is about the experience of designing the concept Objectmodel and the hierarchical layers architecture. The first step in the design of the concept objectmodel is to design Use Cases which describe the current company processes. Working from those Use Cases the business object can be identified. Finally these business object can be grouped together to make the logical architecture. This presentation includes these steps from Use Cases to logical architecture. Having the logical architecture the next step is to start building applications according to the logical architecture. The framework for building those new applications is the physical architecture. This architecture describes the tools and techniques which are used to implement the components in the logical architecture. Currently the tools and techniques from the physical architecture are being used to develop part of the logical architecture. This presentation also includes experiences in the development of these components for new software applications.
The aim of this presentation is to show the lifecycle of component based development. First the Use Cases, followed by the conceptual objectmodel, and the logical architecture describe the logical architecture of the components. Second the physical architecture to describe the tools and techniques for actually building the components. And finally the experience of building the first components for a software application.
This presentation describes the steps for developing a distributed application using standard Ada 95 features as described in Annex E of the Reference Manual. A special emphasis will be placed on GLADE specific features such as its configuration language, support for heterogenous configuration and replication.
Mark Laureys joined OSF's (Open Software Foundation) European Operations based in Brussels in June 1991 as Marketing Communications Manager. He is now Regional Director for the Open Group in Europe and responsible for EU Affairs. His primary responsibilities are to develop the Open Group activities and business in these areas.
Mark started his career as Communications Manager for a Belgian network integrating company called Telindus Networks, part of the Telinfo Group. He owns Master Degrees from the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels in Roman Philology and Neurolinguistics and post graduated in Business to Business Marketing via VLEKHO and VEV. Mark has given many lectures at international conferences and seminars about technical subjects such as Distributed Computing, Security, WWW, Architecture Frameworks and has been Director of the Belgian Unix Users Group.
Bill Beckwith is Chief Technology Officer for Objective Interface Systems, Inc. Bill is one of the founders of the company and is a member of the board of directors. He is co-author of the OMG IDL to Ada 95 mapping. Bill is treasurer and past chairman of the Washington DC SIGAda chapter. He has worked for various software companies including Interbase, Systems Center, VM Software, Computer Associates, and STSC. Bill graduated from Florida State University with degrees in accounting and finance.
I am a professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), where I am a member of the research group Distributed Systems and Computer Networks. I teach the following courses: informatica-werktuigen; structuur en organisatie van computersystemen, deel 2; programmatuur voor real-time controle; computer programming. In general my research interests are distributed and parallel systems, system support for distributed applications (a.o. mobile agents), distributed computing, computer architecture.
Bernard Maudry is Director of Research and Developments at Top Graph'X. He is co-founder of Top Graph'X, and is the designer of OrbAda.
Since 1986 I have been working in the software engineering segment. After graduation I started to work at Hollandse Signaal Apparaten in Hengelo, the Netherlands. I was part of the team responsible for the development for host/target applications; a communication protocol for remote debugging, a monitor program for MC680xx processors, and a file management system for a disk drive. Later at HAS I became responsible for the new Rational/Ada and Sun/Unix environment.
In 1990 I became a technical consultant for Rational Scandinavia. Located in Stockholm, Sweden, I was responsible for the technical support for the Rational customers in Sweden and Denmark. Part of my tasks was to modify and test several Rational products, like the adaptation for the Cross Development Facility to adapt to a special MC68020 board, and the maturation and testing of the newly released Cross Development Facility. Did several training sessions for customers, System managers Training Course, Object Oriented and Ada.
In 1993 I started to work at the Maritime Simulation Centre the Netherlands (MSCN), located in Wageningen, the Netherlands. I was part of the team for the design, implementation, testing and integration of mathematical models for the nautical simulators, the manoeuvring, the engineroom and the cargohandler simulator in Ada using the Booch Object Oriented Design Method. As design engineer I implemented and integrated the pipe behavior for a trailing dredge hopper simulator, the steam system for the engineroom simulator. Furthermore I did the integration tests and the installation at the customer site of the cargohandler simulator, and the radar simulator.
In my current function, since 1997, as a System Architect at the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands located in Wageningen, I am resposible for the design of the MARIN's application software. Since the beginning of this year the development of software at MARIN has changed radically to component based development. A conceptual object model was setup, showing the architecture of the components. Currently this conceptual model is used to develop new software application. I am responsible for the conceptual object model and for the design of new applications according to this object model.
Cyrille Comar is a member of Ada Core Technologies (ACT) and founder of ACT Europe. He is one of the key architects of GNAT and has implemented the object-oriented features and its library model.
THE OPEN GROUP is a vendor-neutral, international consortium of more than 300 members whose mission is to cause the creation of a viable, global information infrastructure that is ubiquitous, trusted, reliable and as easy to use as the telephone. THE OPEN GROUP's members represent end user organizations, including leaders in worldwide finance, government, academia, health care, commerce and telecommunications, which have combined IT budgets in excess of $22 billion annually.
Through extensive research with its member organizations and sponsor IT vendor companies, THE OPEN GROUP has acknowledged that the public information infrastructure today -- the Internet -- presents tremendous economic opportunity and has many important tools in place, including the World Wide Web, that give it great promise. But, the Internet is currently an ill-disciplined environment that has significant security problems associated with it. As a result, few companies are willing to accept the risk of committing anything remotely important, valuable or critical to their business operations onto it. To meet the needs of companies and organizations worldwide, THE OPEN GROUP wants to facilitate the creation of the IT DialTone: a secure and reliable information technology (IT) infrastructure over which valuable, operational business may be conducted that is as easy to use as the telephone.
THE OPEN GROUP is particularly well positioned to lead the IT DialTone initiative. For 15 years, THE OPEN GROUP has been the industry's flagship standards organization, developing rich experience in the collaborative process to ensure technology meets the needs of users worldwide. With $60M in annual revenue, THE OPEN GROUP conducts four major activities to ensure the realization of the IT DialTone. It provides a vendor-neutral forum for buyers and suppliers of technology. That forum has led to collaborative teams who discuss ways of bringing innovative technologies to market. In addition, its Research Institute conducts advanced technology development, and its internationally recognized X Brand testing and product branding process assists the industry in achieving an interoperable, secure and reliable IT infrastructure that protects the investments of current technologies while building the critical bridges to the future.
THE OPEN GROUP was formed in February 1996 by merging X/Open Company Ltd. (founded in 1984) and the Open Software Foundation (founded in 1988). THE OPEN GROUP's nine sponsors are Digital, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, NCR, Novell, Siemens Nixdorf and Sun. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, the Open Group can be reached on the Worldwide Web at www.opengroup.org.
Founded in 1989, Objective Interface Systems, Inc. of Reston Virginia, provides the Ada 95 object-oriented programming community with sophisticated, productive, CORBA-compliant tools, training, and support to implement software systems in a cost-effective and reliable manner. Objective Interface is known for its realtime development tools and expertise. Other product suites include Screen Machine, a tool for building portable, multi-threaded graphical user interfaces and Ada_SQL_Connect, an ODBC-based Ada library for developing platform and vendor independent high performance SQL applications. Objective Interface co-authored, with MITRE, the OMG-approved IDL - Ada 95 mapping.
The faculty of engineering of the K.U.Leuven was one of the first in Europe to recognize the importance of computer science in education and research. Already in 1962 a course towards a degree of "Master of Science in Applied Mathematics" ("burgerlijk ingenieur in de toegepaste wiskunde") was started. The main subjects were computers, programming and numerical mathematics. A few years later the "Applied Mathematics and Programming Group" ("Afdeling Toegepaste Wiskunde en Programmatie") was founded. A number of undergraduate mathematics courses were taught by the members of the group. At that time also a course in numerical mathematics and a programming course were introduced in the first year as a basic part of the engineering education. The real start of the department came in 1971 when a full program for "Master of Engineering in Computer Science" ("burgerlijk ingenieur in de computerwetenschappen") was started. The group expanded quickly and in 1981 it became the Department of Computer Science. The Department has two divisions: Informatics, and Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/topgraphx/
Top Graph'X is known for its Ada software components. The company is the only company providing a full Ada implementation of X11 and OSF/Motif libraries. It also provides now a full Ada 95 implementation of a CORBA environment.
http://www.nl-knowhow.org/organisations/MARIN.html
The Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) performs research and development and offers consultative assistance to the maritime industry. The maritime industry includes the shipping, shipbuilding and offshore industry and governmental and supra-national organisations. Consultative assistance mainly involves the optimisation of design and operation of ships and offshore constructions for hydrodynamic and nautical point of view. The main activities of the institute categorised by market segment are: ships (resistance, propulsion, cavitation and noise, manoeuvring and seakeeping); offshore (behaviour of and loads on floating and fixed structures in waves, wind and current, dynamic positioning, mooring and installation); software engineering (development of software both as tool and as product, measurements on board ships and offshore structures); automation and instrumentation (development of measuring and monitoring systems for both model and full-scale applications); technology transfer (assisting in the development of new test facilities and their instrumentation for third parties and in data acquisition systems, training and education, including advanced courses in hydrodynamics for engineers).
The Software Engineering department is responsible for the development, delivery and support of MARIN's advanced hydrodynamic application software. MARIN has more than 65 years, experience in hydrodynamic research, development, testing and monitoring for the shipping, shipbuilding and offshore industry. The activities of the Software Engineering department include the development of computational models, numerical solution techniques and assembly of integrated software packages for computational tools in the following fields: ship resistance, powering, manoeuvring and seekeeping; ship propellers and their propulsor systems; dynamic behaviour of advanced vessels such as catamarans, SES and hydrofoils; floating production, storage and offloading; dynamic analysis of flexible risers, pipe bundles and arrays; offshore installation; dynamic positioning.
http://www.gnat.com/ & http://www.act-europe.fr/
ACT Europe provides support for commercial, industrial and military uses of the GNAT Ada 95 compiler system in Europe. It also provides consulting, training and customization in all areas of Ada software development, with a special emphasis on distributed systems. Its close ties to Ada Core Technologies and to the GNAT project make available to the European Ada community a strong level of expertise in Ada Software, and high quality technical support for new users of Ada 95.
Copies of the new 14th Edition of the Walnut Creek Ada CD-ROM set,
bought by Ada-Belgium through an agreement with the
Special Interest Group on Ada
of the ACM (ACM SIGAda), will be freely distributed to the first
registered participants, up to the amount available. (Last year we
could satisfy all demands.)
This CD-ROM set includes a.o. ports to lots of platforms of the
GNU Ada 95 compiler (GNAT),
and
Aonix' Ada 95 Compiler and Environment for Windows 95.
![[NEW]](/~dirk/.image/new-s.gif)
More information on this
special CD-ROM edition for Ada-Belgium'97
is available separately.
Through an agreement with the Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO), copies of the Discovering Ada CD-ROM will also be freely distributed (November 1996 Edition). This multimedia CD-ROM of Ada training covers all the basic points of Ada 95 through interactive lessons and voice-overs. It also includes positive testimonials on the benefits of Ada 95 from people who have used it. And last but not least, it contains new material about using Ada 95 and AppletMagic (Intermetrics' Ada 95-to-Java byte-code compiler) to create Java-compatible applets.
As a last-minute surprise we even have a third free CD-ROM for all of
you!
CCI
(Competence Center Informatik GmbH) provided copies of the
Ada-Tour Version 2.0i CD-ROM for distribution at the seminar.
This Ada-Tour offers an extensive introduction to Ada 95 and is
targeted to people wanting to find out more about the language, its
foundations and possibilities. More information is
available
on the CCI Web-pages (in German).
It is a tradition that lots of interesting documents are distributed (freely) on the Seminar day.
For this 7th Annual Seminar each participant will be offered, a.o., a printed copy of the CORBA IDL to Ada 95 mapping document, thanks to the assistance of DG XII at the European Commission. Moreover, printed proceedings with papers related to the presentations, copies of slides, and additional documents and papers will be distributed.
In addition to the free documentation, we are happy to announce that
Addison-Wesley Longman Publishers
will be present with a selection of their Ada publications. Books
will be available for purchase at an attractive discount.
The Seminar takes place at the premises of Trasys, 7 av. Ariane, 1200 Brussels (Woluwe), Belgium. Parking facilities are available.
See also "How to get there and where to stay?"
4000 BEF for Ada-Belgium members 6000 BEF for non-members Free registration for full-time students (without lunch)
The participation fee includes all coffee breaks and lunch, full documentation, and a free Walnut Creek Ada CD-ROM set (up to the amount available). Students can optionally pay for lunch or sandwiches.
The attached Registration Form has to be returned, signed, preferably before Monday November 24, 1997. Students may arrange registration in group through their institution.
Ada-Belgium'97 Seminar Secretariat c/o Trasys Attn.: Mr. Guido Duerinckx 7 av. Ariane B-1200 Brussels Belgium Phone: +32-2-773.78.57 Fax: +32-2-773.79.30 E-mail: ada@belgium.eu.net WWW: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/
We would like to thank our sponsors for their continued support of our activities: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Koninklijke Militaire School / Ecole Royale Militaire (K.M.S./E.R.M.), OFFIS nv/sa, Rational Software Corporation, Trasys nv/sa, and Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.).
![[K.U.Leuven]](/~dirk/.image/KULeuven_small.gif)
![[KMS/ERM]](/~dirk/.image/rma.gif)
![[OFFIS]](/~dirk/.image/offis.gif)
![[Rational Software Corporatio
n]](/~dirk/.image/rational.gif)
![[Trasys]](/~dirk/.image/trasys.gif)
![[U.L.B.]](/~dirk/.image/ulb-2.gif)
Special thanks to ACM/SIGAda (ACM Special Interest Group on the Ada programming language), AJPO - AdaIC (Ada Joint Program Office - Ada Information Clearinghouse), CCI (Competence Center Informatik GmbH), and DG XII at the European Commission (Directorate-General XII: Science, Research and Development) for their support of this event.
Information on this and other Ada-Belgium events is available on the Internet at the Ada-Belgium World-Wide-Web pages and is updated regularly. Check out URL
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/local.html
![[Ada-Belgium]](/~dirk/.image/ada-belgium-icon.gif){kind=icon}
To the Ada-Belgium home page.
To the Ada-Belgium'97 Home Page.
Last update: 97/11/27.
Dirk Craeynest