Ada Server Faces 0.3.0 is available

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 16, 2012

Stephane Carrez from Java 2 Ada is hard at work on his Ada Server Faces framework, and as this online demo clearly is showing, he’s making good progress. The version 0.3.0 release announcement outlines some of what Ada Server Faces is:

Ada Server Faces is a web framework which uses the Java Server Faces design patterns (See JSR 252 and JSR 314).

JSF and ASF use a component-based model for the design and implementation of a web application. The presentation layer is implemented using XML or XHTML files and the component layer is implemented in Ada 05 for ASF and in Java for JSF.

I can’t claim a whole lot of knowledge about the Java Server Faces design patterns, but judging from the demo, it’s some pretty powerful stuff. I look forward to tracking this project further, especially considering my involvement in the AdaHeads K/S project.

 
Posted in Ada Libraries, Ada Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

CUDA/Ada version 0.1

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 16, 2012

Back in December 2011 we reported on an early developer version of the newly started CUDA/Ada project, and now a mere 2 months later the codelabs.ch guys have officially released version 0.1 of the CUDA/Ada binding to Nvidia’s CUDA platform:

CUDA/Ada is an Ada binding to NVIDIA’s CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model. This project was developed during the course of the master seminar “Program Analysis and Transformation” at the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil.

There’s a nice benchmark chart on the website, which really shows of the power of CUDA/Ada, and there’s also an interesting paper (PDF) available with lots of information about the project.

You can download the latest version here and you can read the release announcement here.

 
Posted in Ada Bindings, Ada Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

GWindows – A New Ada GUI Framework For Windows

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 14, 2012

A new GUI framework for Ada is always welcome, even though this is one restricted to one platform. GWindows is..

…the Professional Open Source Ada 95 Win32 RAD Framework. It introduces for the first time to Ada programming a comprehensive rapid application development framework spanning GUI, Database and Active X integration. It brings the power of Ada to programming domains that up until now are dominated by VB and Delphi.

GWindows includes extensive bindings to the Windows GUI including support for common controls and dialogs, printing, and owner drawn extensions to controls. In addition, GWindows adds a number of new controls, keyboard support, multiple models of event handling, Active
X controls, support for creating dialogs and windows from resource files, dynamic garbage collected windows, Window docking, non-GUI bindings, database support, database bound controls, and much more!

GWindows builds as either ANSI or UNICODE (a first for Ada!) for internationalization and performance boosts on Windows NT, 2000, and XP. GWindows is tightly integrated with GNATCOM, the Ada 95 COM/DCOM/COM+ Development Framework and Tools opening every facet of the Windows platforms to Ada 95 development. Never again will the cries be heard, “but there are no bindings” on the Windows platform!

GWindows is designed to take advantage of Ada’s unique combination of features rich typing mechanisms. It is not a think binding to an underlying C interface, but a complete framework that takes advantage of Ada at every level.

Usage seems pretty simple and straightforward, and creating the ever popular Hello world! application is done rather easily:

with GWindows.Windows.Main; use GWindows.Windows.Main;
with GWindows.Application;
 
procedure Hello_World is
   pragma Linker_Options ("-mwindows");
 
   Main_Window : Main_Window_Type;
begin
   Create (Main_Window, "Hello world!");
   Visible (Main_Window, True);
 
   GWindows.Application.Message_Loop;
end Hello_World;

Yea, I just completely stole that from their tutorial – I haven’t actually tried it, since I don’t use Windows.

If you’re an Ada programmer and you’re itching to build some GUI applications, then be sure to take a look at the GWindows documentation to see if it suits your fancy.

You can read the full release announcement here.

 
Posted in Ada Libraries, Ada Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Strings edit v2.7

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 14, 2012

Hot on the heels of Strings Edit v2.6 comes v2.7. This latest releases fixes some bugs in the implementation of String-based streams. You can read Dmitry’s short and sweet release announcement here.

 
Posted in Ada Libraries, Ada Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Paraffin 2.4 Released

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 14, 2012

Back in October 2011 we reported on the release of version 2.0 of Brad Moore’s Paraffin library, and now, a mere 3½ months later we’re graced with the latest and greatest: Paraffin version 2.4.

Since the name Paraffin in itself doesn’t give away what it does, here’s a quote from the project website:

A suite of Ada 2005 generics to facilitate iterative and recursive parallelism for multicore systems and provide safer recursion for single and multicore systems. Includes useful generics for parallel quicksort, fast fourier transform, function integration, and Red-Black trees.

New in this release is:

  • Added a reusable utility to solve a matrix of linear equations using Gauss-Jordan Elimination.
  • Added test_matrix test driver for parallel/sequential matrix solvers.
  • Red-Black Tree containers fully implemented now. (Delete, and Contains calls work)
  • Split Red-Black Tree container into separate generics
    • Sequential
    • Work sharing
    • Work Seeking
    • Stack Safe Work Seeking
  • The Red Black Tree generic was previously intended mostly as a test driver for Paraffin Recursive generics. Now the generic has been completed to a state where it can be reused on its own as a generic container.
  • Changed use of Unchecked_Conversion for Recurse supprogram access to use ‘Unrestricted_Access instead. This cleaned the code up considerably in this area. One issue to look into, is that ‘Unrestricted_Access is a non-standard attribute. It is supported by both GNAT and the ICC compiler however. It may not be supported by other Ada 2005 compilers. Unfortunately, Unchecked_Conversion in this case is not portable either, and may not even continue to work with the existing compilers, so it was thought that using ‘Unrestricted_Access was the best option for now. Will investigate to see if there is a possibility for a better solution, or providing a portable mechanism in a future version of Ada.

Yea, Brad’s been busy!

You can read the full release announcement here.

 
Posted in Ada Libraries, Ada Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Interval Arithmetic for Ada, v1.10

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 14, 2012

If one day you’re finding yourself in need of doing some interval arithmetic in Ada, then you need look no further than Dmitry Kazakov’s Interval Arithmetic for Ada package:

The packages define a logical and interval types. The interval types are obtained through instantiation of the corresponding generic packages. Interval and numeric types can be mixed where the result has mathematical sense.

So if tri-state logic and dimensioned intervals is what you need, then be sure to check out this package. It’s available in 32/64 bit flavors for Fedora and Debian, and of course also as a plain source package. You can read the full release announcement here.

 
Posted in Ada Libraries | Tagged | Leave a comment

Zip-Ada v.42 released

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 10, 2012

A few days ago Gautier de Montmollin mentioned that the .42 release of Zip-Ada was in the works, and today it was finally released on the world.

Zip-Ada is a programming library for dealing with the Zip compressed archive file format. The full sources of Zip-Ada are in Ada, compilable on every compiler and for every system. For more details, read the files zipada.txt and zip.ads from the archive below.

New in version .42 is:

  • Support for Zip archives appended to other files, like a self-extracting archive with Zip-Ada in the executable.
  • Support for Unicode UTF-8 entry names within Zip archives.
  • New package Zip.Compress.Deflate, with a first (weak but straightforward) compression technique for the Deflate format

For those of you wondering why one should use this library, instead of simply just using the zlib library, the answer is simple and straightforward: Independence. With Zip-Ada you can zip and unzip data without any OS-dependent external calls, which obviously is a nice thing. You should also, theoretically, get better portability, since you don’t have to worry about the existence of zlib (or similar) on the target platform. Gautier have tested Zip-Ada with several different environments, so there’s a good chance it will work on almost whatever you throw at it.

You can read the full release announcement here.

 
Posted in Ada Libraries, Ada Programming | Tagged | 2 Comments

Report from the February 2012 open Ada-DK meeting

By Kim Rostgaard Christensen | Published: February 9, 2012

What this meeting lacked in numbers it weighed up in fun discussions and tryouts of bleeding-edge card games.

Only Thomas Løcke and Kim Rostgaard Christensen was present at this meeting, so the time was passed discussing code, politics, operating systems, weirdness of corporate strategies and Ada in the education system.

The meeting was started of with a massive beating of Thomas Løcke in a game of CPU Wars, which then led to a stroll down memory lane revisiting some of the processors that had been a big part of our lives.

The food was excellent as always, and the dinner discussion ever interesting. The discussion rather fast went into AdaHeads-mode as there were no non-AdaHeads-folks to stop us. What was agreed here, is a story for another day – and a quite interesting one I must say.

- Stay tuned.

 
Posted in Ada-DK Meetings | 3 Comments

FOSDEM 2012 Ada Presentations

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 9, 2012

For those of us not lucky enough to have been able to attend FOSDEM 2012, I’m very glad to report that all the Ada presentations are now available at the Ada Belgium website. There’s some really good stuff in there, so be sure to check it out.

But there’s more good news: The FOSDEM 2012 people are apparently working on getting some of the videos of the event online. I cannot begin to express how much I appreciate that. I really look forward to seeing the presentations. It’ll be almost the same as having been there myself. Almost.

 
Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The February 2012 Open Ada-DK Meeting

By Thomas Løcke | Published: February 6, 2012

February 7th. 2012 from 1800 -> ? marks the day and time when the fifteenth open Ada-DK meeting is being held.

The “open” part means that the meeting is not a members-only affair, but that anybody interested in Ada is welcome, so feel free to invite whomever you might believe could be interested in spending an evening talking about Ada programming.

If you’re interested in participating, feel free to send us an email and we’ll inform you of the when and where. You can also ping me at Google+, identi.ca/thomaslocke or join the Freenode IRC #ada channel and look for ThomasLocke.

The meeting is of course free.

 
Posted in Ada-DK Meetings | Leave a comment