2008 Proceeding- General Chair:
- Michael B. Feldman,
- Program Chair:
- Leemon C. Baird
Welcome to the 2008 Annual International Conference of ACM's Special Interest Group on Ada (SIGAda), being held in Portland, Oregon, USA.
We offer you a conference featuring a top-quality technical program focused on important strengths of Ada: distributed, real-time, and embedded systems. The visions of these systems reflected in Ada's original requirements in the 1970s have expanded in almost unimaginable ways with Ada 95 and Ada 2005 implementations, and continue to be objects of envy by those in the programming language community who understand what the strengths of a language bring to implementers in terms of efficiency, reliability, and effectiveness. Software challenges remain dominant in these domains with rapid hardware advances. Most other languages fail to meet the needs identified as far back as the 1978 Steelman, being able at best to do only 3/4 of the needed functions while Ada performs over 95%. Ada's track record of reliability, efficiency, robustness and all-around success is unparalleled at solving real-time and/or distributed system challenges. Ada is used in space/satellite systems, most modern jetliner avionics, high-speed ground transportation systems, and battle automation systems. As such, it is an important part of the world's economies and defenses.
Three days of technical papers, keynotes, and invited presentations report how these successes are achieved and where remaining issues are leading. We are fortunate to have leaders in the software engineering community to provide keynote addresses to set the tone for our conference.
Beyond the formal conference of selected papers and presentations, SIGAda 2008 also offers workshops and tutorials with the same duality of on-theme and complementary topics. SIGAda's tutorials provide full-day or half-days on selected topics to enhance one's professional development. SIGAda's workshops allow those working the same issues to share with each other and leverage everyone's accomplishments; workshop products are "delivered" to the community.
The broad offerings of career-enhancing tutorials include basic Ada 2005 introductions for software engineers new to Ada, intermediate and advanced Ada topics for practitioners striving to expand their Ada expertise, and several language-independent technology topics. These topics are often coupled with Ada technology because only Ada's full and complete definition allows one to indicate what is expected, and to show that it can be achieved.
Finally, SIGAda 2008 provides an outstanding opportunity for rewarding affiliation with colleagues in industry, academia, and government - discussions "in the hall," informal meal-time meetings, and even during the more relaxed moments we make for socializing in this wonderful southern city.
Proceeding Downloads
SF1: introduction to ada
Level - Beginner, but attendees should have some experience with a high-level programming language.
This tutorial is designed for those who have some familiarity with a programming language, but who are new to Ada. In the morning, we will discuss the ...
SP1: service oriented architecture (SOA) concepts and implementations for Ada
Level - Intermediate.
This tutorial covers the principles of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) including loose coupling, encapsulation, reusability, composibility, etc. The attendee will learn about the Ada Web Server (AWS) and how SOA interfaces, ...
MA1: Ada for real-time and parallel processing
Level - Intermediate. This tutorial assumes basic knowledge or experience with the Ada programming language.
This tutorial covers two of the major problems with parallel and real-time programming - time management and storage management. Parallel ...
MP1: languages for safety-critical software: issues and assessment
Level - Intermediate.
This intermediate-level tutorial is aimed at people with a technical background in software development. No previous experience with safety-critical standards is required. Some familiarity with one or more of C, C++, Ada, or Java ...
30 years after steelman, does DoD still have a software crisis?
Dr. Tokar will investigate whether or not the Department of Defense has a software crisis today, 30 years after the 'Steelman' document, which defined the requirements for the use of software within the Department.
The Ada paradox(es)
Ada was designed as a tool tailored for industrial software engineering. When we compare the initial requirements with the current language, the match is excellent. However, Ada did not gain the popularity that was expected by its designers - without ...
From strawman to Ada 2005: a socio-technical retrospective
Dr. Brosgol will look at Ada's evolution, including the requirements formulation phase that preceded the language design, and highlight key developments.
Dynamic analysis of Ada programs for comprehension and quality measurement
During maintenance and particularly during corrective and perfective tasks, systems tend to exhibit a weight gain. As a result, their quality tends to degrade. Software comprehension is vital in order to assess system quality. In this paper, we aim at ...
Re-ADA: reliable Ada-based descriptive architecture for C4ISR via a quantitative interoperating model
Military commands must respond to a variety of situations by quickly assembling and organizing coalition forces consisting of different components from several countries. Dependable interoperability of their C4ISR systems is vital to the success of many ...
A buffer container class hierarchy using Ada 2005
This paper describes the design of a set of multi-purpose containers that implement a buffer abstraction. These buffers feature a multi-layered approach where specialized higher level abstractions can statically select their low level implementation. ...
Real-time synchronization on distributed architecture with Ada-2005
Ada is found in most Avionics processing. It is often the hidden software that makes life safe in systems that fly most passenger/private aircraft. In an effort to promote the use of Ada-2005 in more embedded systems, we will present a Distributed Stack ...
A multi-language service-oriented architecture using an enterprise service bus
An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides developers a platform for the straightforward development of a multi-language Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Mule, an open source ESB, is presented as one such ESB that easily provides a multi-language SOA ...
Ada and software engineering education: one professor's experiences
How do you select a programming language for your project? Few developers have the luxury of coding the same design in multiple languages to compare language merits. For over twenty years my undergraduate students have implemented the same large (10-15K ...
Implementing the extended return statement for Ada 2005
Ada 2005 adds an important capability to the language by allowing the construction and return of an object of a limited type by a function. New syntax for an extended return statement was added to enhance this capability further. This capability to ...
Removing backward go-to statements from Ada programs: possibilities and problems
We here apply a recent mathematical result to the design of a process for removing backward go-to statements from Ada programs. Such statements are often used by programmers whose only reasons to use Ada are contractual. The mathematical result involves ...
Distributed status monitoring and controlusing remote buffers and Ada 2005
The ability to monitor status and control equipment distributed over a network is a common network management need. This paper describes a relatively simple approach to designing a prototype dynamic network where the assets of all vehicles on the ...
Anima: a Ada derived programming language for real-time embedded software development
Currently, embedded programs are written in a variety of programming languages. None were specifically designed for the real-time environment. The use of a general purpose language for embedded systems can lead to inefficient applications which are more ...
A distributed, multi-language architecture for large unmanned ground vehicles
- Cynthia Cicalese,
- Richard Weatherly,
- Joel Sherrill,
- Robert Bolling,
- Kevin Forbes,
- Robert Grabowski,
- Keven Ring,
- David Seidel
In this paper, we describe the design and development of a network of large unmanned ground vehicles (LUGVs) using low-cost, off-the-shelf technology and building upon experience gained at the 2005 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand ...
GNAT BoF: where would you like to see GNAT go?
This BoF will discuss future directions for the GNAT technology, including both the GAP and Pro versions. We at AdaCore will give some of our thoughts on interesting future possibilities, but mostly we would like to hear from the user community, so we ...
