Tag: Ada Connection 2011

Ada Connection 2011 Lecture Videos

I’m a sucker for videos. Sure, I’m also a sucker for well-written articles, but there’s just something nice and relaxing about putting on your headphones, grabbing a cup of tea and enjoying a good video about Ada programming.

Or any other interesting subject for that matter.

Luckily AdaCore have put up a bunch of videos from the Ada Connection 2011 conference talks.

Currently there’s good stuff like:

Apparently AdaCore will be adding a new video every Monday, so be sure to keep checking in for all the goodies.

Ada Europe 2011 / The Ada Connection 2011

21-23 June I (Jacob Sparre Andersen) participated in the annual Ada Europe conference. This year the conference was held in Edinburgh.

The conference was a good opportunity to present one of my recent projects – the Crimeville language server – and to meet other people interested in reliable software technologies.

Some of the new knowledge I brought home from Edinburgh:

  • Software professionals would probably be wise to make note of the Hippocratic oath, and consider how it applies to their work. (thanks to Pippa Moore)
  • Supposedly there exists such a thing as “too many cores”. (thanks to Alan Burns)
  • The term “technical debt” and a bit of knowledge about the SQALE quality assesment model. (thanks to Jean-Pierre Rosen)
  • The core of agile methods is to continously hit the customer over the head with an incomplete product until he submits. (thanks to Les Hatton)
  • It is not at all easy to do static verification of linked data structures. (thanks to Phil Thornley)
  • A nice way to implement mixed criticality real-time systems in pure Ada. (thanks to Alan Burns)
  • There exists an ARM chip with built-in 3D accelerometer. (thanks to one of the exhibitors)

Traditional events:

  • A new suggestion for an extension to AdaControl: Make it possible to tell AdaControl which packages contain potentially blocking operations.
  • Maciek was quick to find a weak point in the implementation I presented in my talk. It is always nice to have an attentive audience.

New reading materials:

  • “High-Integrity Object-Oriented Programming in Ada” from AdaCore.

Auxilerary stuff: The lunches at the conference centre were disappointing. The conference dinner at the Signet Library was excellent (first time I tasted haggis), and my dinners in Edinburgh were generally good and interesting.

I didn’t have much time to go sightseeing, but the bits of the town I saw were charming, and I hope I can get more time to enjoy the town next time I come to Edinburgh.

Various thoughts: Should you force yourself to check in documentation and code together?

How can you have some kind of independent validation on a small project?

Are there any nice tools for tracing requirements, architectural decisions, and specifications through to source code?

I really should get started using AdaControl (and Valgrind) (and now also SQALE) on my code.

The Crimeville Language Server

Our very own Jacob Sparre will be giving a presentation at The Ada Connection 2011 Conference on the spelling/language server he has developed for the Danish (soon international) childrens game Crimeville. For those of us that aren’t fortunate enough to be in Edinburgh for the conference, Jacob has made both the presentation (PDF file) and the source code (ZIP file) available on his website.

Here’s a blurb from the presentation:

When Art of Crime contacted me, their problem was simply
described as helping the players write correctly, and limit how much they insult each other. – Already at this stage the plan
was to do this at the word level. In short, every word written by a player should be categorized in one of four categories; correct, foul, misspelled or unknown. I proposed a solution with network servers checking words using Ispell compatible Open Source spell checkers.

It is an interesting read for sure, and the accompanying source code is just an added benefit for those of us who’d like to learn how to best tame Ada to do our bidding. This obviously includes me, so thanks a bunch Jacob! :o)

The Ada Connection

We’re ever so slowly closing in on the 16th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies and the Ada Conference UK 2011, this time combined into The Ada Connection 2011. A call for participation has gone out, featuring this years programme.

And what a programme it is!

This year also boasts a nice range of vendors showing their products.

The event is held in Edinburgh, so if you’re an Ada’ist in that area, be sure to check it out.

The Ada Connection – FINAL Call for Industrial Presentations

The deadline for submitting industrial presentations for The Ada Connection is January 8th. 2011.

The Ada Connection combines the 16th. International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies – Ada-Europe 2011 – with Ada Conference UK 2011.

You can read the final call in its entirety here.

Ada-Europe 2011, Call for Industrial Presentations

A call has gone out for industrial presentations for the Ada Connection 2011 conference:

This call for industrial presentations is specifically targeted to those of you who either work on industrial projects (possibly Ada-related) where reliable software is important, or know people working on such projects. Consider what others might learn from the experience gained in those projects, and please try to get a presentation overview submitted by January 8th at the latest, i.e. one month from now. Many projects could report a lot of valuable experience: sharing it with others benefits the whole community and might provide useful feedback to the project as well.

Some of the conference topics include:

  • Software Architectures: Architectural Styles, Service-Oriented Architectures, Cloud Service Model, Design Patterns, Frameworks, Architecture-Centered Development, Component and Class Libraries, Component-based Design and Development.
  • Mainstream and Emerging Applications: Manufacturing, Robotics, Avionics, Space, Health Care, Transportation, Energy, Fun and Business Games, Telecommunication, etc.
  • The Future of Ada: New language features, implementation and use issues; positioning in the market and in education; where should Ada stand in the software engineering curriculum; lessons learned on Ada Education and Training Activities with bearing on any of the conference topics.

And much much more.

LinkedIn users can help spread the word by letting their network know that they are interested in this event.