FOSDEM 2012 - Ada Developer Room, Sat 4 2012, Brussels

FOSDEM 2012 - Ada Developer Room, Sat 4 2012, Brussels

[Dirk Craeynest]

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                 Ada-Belgium is pleased to announce its

                   Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012

(Ada at the Free and Open-Source Software Developers' European Meeting)

                        Saturday 4 February 2012

 Universit� Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.), Solbosch Campus, Room AW1.121
     Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt Laan 50, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium

                Organized in cooperation with Ada-Europe

<http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/12/120204-fosdem.html>

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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).

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.


Main Track Keynote (Janson auditorium, 1400 seats)
------------------

11:00-11:50 Free Software: a viable model for commercial success
            by Robert Dewar - AdaCore

  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.


Ada Developer Room Presentations (AW1.121, 81 seats)
--------------------------------

12:00-12:05 Welcome
            by Dirk Craeynest - Ada-Belgium

  Welcome to the Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012.

12:05-12:50 An introduction to Ada 2005 and Ada 2012
            by Jean-Pierre Rosen - Adalog

  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!

13:00-13:25 Ada in the on-line multi-user game Crimeville
            by Jacob Sparre Andersen - Research & Innovation

  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.

13:30-13:55 The contract model of Ada 2012
            by Jean-Pierre Rosen - Adalog

  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.

14:00-14:50 Multicore programming support in Ada
            by Jos� F. Ruiz - AdaCore

  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.

15:00-15:25 Lovelace: towards a full Ada OS
            by Xavier Grave - Ada-France

  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.

15:30-15:55 Programming Arduinos in Ada
            by Jacob Sparre Andersen - Research & Innovation

  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.

16:00-16:50 Programming LEGO MINDSTORMS robots in Ada
            by Jos� F. Ruiz - AdaCore

  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.

17:00-17:25 Ada on Rails
            by David Sauvage - AdaLabs

  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.

17:30-17:55 PPETP: a P2P streaming protocol implemented in Ada
            by Riccardo Bernardini - University of Udine

  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.

18:00-18:30 The future of Ada: Robert Dewar looks into his cloudy
            crystal ball
            by Robert Dewar - AdaCore

  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.

18:30-19:00 Open discussion and networking

  Informal discussions, revisiting topics of today's presentations,
  etc.

More information on Ada DevRoom
-------------------------------

Speakers bios, pointers to relevant information, links to other sites
about this event, etc., are available on the Ada-Belgium site at
<http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/12/120204-fosdem.html>.

We invite you to attend some or all of the presentations: they will
be given in English.  Everybody interested can attend FOSDEM 2012;
no registration is necessary.

We hope to see many of you there!

Dirk Craeynest
Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be (for Ada-Belgium/-Europe/SIGAda/WG9 mail)

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