For your information:

I will be hosting a Birds-of-feather at next weeks Tri-Ada conference
to discuss the work being done by the OMG CORBA/Real-Time Standards
Special Interest Group. Hopefully interested people would like
to informally discuss some of the issues being raised, and see how
Real-Time Ada (and especially Ada 95) could help with the eventual standards.

See you there..

Scott Moody
Boeing Defense & Space Group
===================================================


----------------------------

TRI-Ada Birds-of-a-Feather
------------------------------------

Wed Dec 4,  5:30-7:30 pm

Title:

   A Role for Ada-95 in Future Open Standards Based,
        Real-Time Distributed Object Technology

Issues:

   (1) Discussion of OMG's Real-Time SIG   (Object Management Group: www.omg.org)
        a. Request for Information (Due Feb 97)             -- will provide some copies
        b. Supporting White Paper and initial requirements  -- will provide some copies
        c. Eventual Request for Proposal (Out about Sep 97)

    1.1 Also mention the POSIX 1003.21 work on
        Real-Time Distributed Systems Communication

   (2) Discuss how Ada Community should respond by showing how
       Ada-95 already has built-in linguistic support for
       Real-Time/Concurrent/Distributed programming.

        a. Show how the Ada-95 runtime systems already designed
           might be modified to support future standards
                (eg.  GNARL, GNAT, GARLIC)
        b. Discuss the portability of Ada-95 and the role of POSIX
        c. Discuss the ease of developing Real-Time Systems
           through native support for building Schedulers, etc.
        d. Utilize the Ada-95 LRM and Rationale sections on
            - requirements, and
            - metrics
           as they could apply to future
           requirement on Real-Time ORBS (Object Request Brokers).

   (3) Raise concerns that eventual standards might make it hard for
       Ada-95 programmers to use their own native real-time features
       and instead be required to use external ORB/API calls
       for things like 'delay', 'semaphores', etc.

       - So Ada needs to hide these low level calls in
       the language itself, and layered architectures like GNAT
       could become very useful.



Contact:    Scott Moody
            Boeing Defense and Space Group
            Reusable Computing Systems Research
            [log in to unmask]

            206-773-8600