****** Ada UK 15th International Conference ******
The 1998 Ada UK conference will be held at the Marriott Hotel,
Bristol on 19-22 October 1998.
For full details and reservations contact the Ada UK
Administrator, Helen Byard, Tel: +44 (0)1904 412740, Fax: +44
(0)1904 426702, email: [log in to unmask]
Also see the web page
http://www.adauk.org.uk/conf/default.htm
Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this document.
*** Summary
Topics this year include Ravenscar Tasking, CORBA, Project
Estimation, Java, Application Experience, OO Design Processes,
Safety-Critical Issues and Patterns
Monday, 19 October: Tutorials
Full-day tutorials will be by Ben Brosgol on Java for Ada
Programmers, including the Application Program Interface and the
Abstract Windowing Toolkit (and applets), and by Putnam Texel on
a complete customizable OO process from requirements engineering
to requirements trace, based on (UML) Use Cases and Categories.
Tuesday/Wednesday, 20 & 21 October: Presentations &
Demonstrations
The Keynote presentation on Tuesday will be by Ben Brosgol, Chair
of SIGAda. Technical presentations will include a session on
safety-critical issues such as the Ravenscar tasking subset, and
a session on reuse including the important topic of Patterns.
Tuesday will conclude with a Panel chaired by Martyn Thomas,
Chairman Emeritus of Praxis Critical Systems; the Panel will
discuss the future direction of best practices in software
engineering. There will be a Reception at Harvey's Wine Museum
in the evening.
The Keynote presentation on Wednesday will be by Robert Dewar,
founder of Ada Core Technologies, on the important topic of
getting an Ada program started. Other presentations will cover
topics such as project estimation with large OO developments,
Java and Ada tasking, the detection of tasking deadlocks, source
control under Windows 95, and design techniques used on the
Jubilee Line. The closing address will be by Martyn Thomas.
Demonstrations of tools and products will be available during
extended midday breaks each day.
Thursday, 22 October: Tutorials
Half-day tutorials in the morning will be by Alan Burns on the
Ravenscar tasking subset, and by Franco Gasperoni on the
practical aspects of using Java and Ada under GNAT. Half-day
tutorials in the afternoon will be by Rob Day on project
estimation using the OdeT tool and by Bill Beckwith on CORBA and
Ada with emphasis on real-time issues.
Organization
This Conference is organized by Ada Language UK Ltd in
collaboration with the Safety Critical Systems Club. Attendees
may register for any combination of days with discounts of up to
30% for multiple days. There are further discounts for members
of Ada UK. Ada UK is an Industrial Affililate of the IEE.
*** Further details follow ***
*** Conference Presentations
* Tuesday 20 October 1998
09.00 Registration
09.45 Conference Welcome
10.00 Keynote Address: Ben Brosgol, Chairman of SIGAda
11.00 Coffee
11.30 Safety Issues
Software Support for Safety Case Construction and Verification,
Ron Pierce, York Software Engineering Ltd.
The Ravenscar Tasking Profile for High Integrity Real-Time
Programs, Brian Dobbing, Aonix Ltd.
12.30 Lunch & Demonstrations
14.30 Reuse
Styles and patterns for distributed software architecture, David
Harvey, Honeygrove Data Ltd.
Collaboration and re-use in enterprise-wide Ada 95 development,
Scott Heyhoe, Cayenne Software Ltd.
Implementing and Exploiting the Observer Design Pattern in Ada
95, Bill Taylor, Rational Software Corporation.
16.00 Tea & Demonstrations
16.30 Panel: Software in Industry.
Martyn Thomas, Chairman Emeritus of Praxis Critical Systems will
Chair the Panel.
17.30 End of Day
18.00 Conference Reception, Harvey's Wine Museum.
* Wednesday 21 October 1998
09.30 Technical Keynote Address: Robert Dewar of Ada Core
Technologies. Getting Started in Ada: The Elaboration Issue.
10.30 Coffee & Demonstrations
11.00 Metrics and Testing
Testing the Waters, John Barnes.
A Tasking Deadlock Detector for Ada 95 Programs, Jingde Cheng,
Kyushu University.
Software Project Estimation: Experiences from a Large Object-
Oriented Ada Project, Rob Day.
12.30 Lunch & Demonstrations
14.30 Applications & technology
A Comparison of the Real-Time Support in Ada and Java, Ben
Brosgol, Aonix Inc.
An Ada pretty-printer for an Integrated Development Environment,
John English, University of Brighton.
Ada code generation for the Jubilee Line, Andrew Farrer of Datel
Technology Ltd.
16.00 Tea
16.30 Concluding Address: Martyn Thomas, Praxis Critical
Systems
17.00 End of Conference.
*** Tutorials ***
* Monday 19 October 1998 : 09.30 17.45 (full-day)
Migrating an OO Model to Ada 95: A complete Method-Independent OO
Process
Putnam P Texel
This full-day tutorial, based on Use Cases Combined with
Booch/OMT/UML: Process and Products (Texel/Williams, Prentice
Hall, 1997) targets management and technical staff, as well as
QA, and introduces them to a complete OO process, starting with
Requirements Engineering and concluding with Requirements Trace.
The OO process presented has been utilized successfully on large
OO efforts and evolved as a result of practical experience with
Booch, OMT, and Shlaer/Mellor on both small and large real-time
and MIS applications. A single Case Study is utilized to present
the products of the process, including a complete OOA and OOD
model in UML notation as well as the Ada 95 solution.
Putnam P Texel is President of TEXEL & Co., Inc., specializing in
migrating organizations to an Object-Oriented development
process. Ms. Texel has been providing training and consulting
for more than 15 years in OO, Ada 95 and C++ both nationally and
internationally. Ms. Texel is an experienced presenter, having
provided tutorials for SIGAda, Software Technology Conference
(STC), TriAda and other national and international conferences.
Java for Ada Programmers
Benjamin M Brosgol
This full-day tutorial presents the basic elements of the Java
language and technology, focusing on the Object-Oriented
Programming model. It is intended for computing professionals
with some knowledge of Ada 83; previous exposure to Ada 95 and
OOP is helpful but not strictly necessary. The tutorial covers
the Java 1.1 features and also outlines some of the new
functionality introduced in Java 1.2. The tutorial will present
the Java facilities in part by comparison with Ada. It will
describe the major semantic points, show examples of programming
style, and offer a technical analysis in terms of expressibility,
maintainability, and run-time performance. After this tutorial,
attendees will understand Java's main features and be able to
develop applications and applets that exploit the language's OOP
approach.
Dr Benjamin Brosgol is Chief Ada Technologist with Aonix in
Burlington, Massachusetts. A well-known figure in the
international Ada community, he has presented numerous papers and
tutorials at Tri-Ada, Ada Europe, WADAS, and TOOLS conferences,
and he is presently serving as chairman of ACM SIGAda. He has
recently developed several Java courses and has presented this
Java language tutorial at a number of conferences, where it has
been highly acclaimed.
* Thursday 22 October 1998 : 09.30 13.00 (half-day)
The Ravenscar Tasking Profile for High Integrity Real-Time Ada
Programs
Alan Burns
The Ravenscar profile defines a simple subset of the tasking
features of Ada in order to support efficient, high integrity
applications that need to be analyzed for their timing
properties. This half day tutorial describes the Profile and
gives the motivations for the features it does (and does not)
include. Analysis methods and support tools are discussed, as
are the means by which the timing characteristics of the run-time
system can be obtained. The Ravenscar Profile was defined at the
Eighth International Real Time Ada Workshop (1997) for high
integrity, efficient, real-time systems. It has been endorsed by
the WG9 working group (HRG) in their ISO report on The Use of Ada
in High Integrity Systems.
Professor Alan Burns leads the Real-Time Systems research group
at the University of York. He has been involved with Ada for
many years and with the series of workshops that led to the
definition of the Ravenscar Profile. He is co-author (with Andy
Wellings) of the only book that comprehensively describes the Ada
tasking model: Concurrency in Ada, the second edition of which
has recently been published by Cambridge University Press. He
has also published a number of other books and over 200 technical
papers.
Ada 95, Java and GNAT: A Manager's and Developer's Roadmap
Franco Gasperoni
This half-day tutorial is for managers, project leaders, software
engineers and programmers who are interested in understanding the
Java technology, its opportunities and how the current Ada
language (Ada 95) can be used on the Java platform. Its
objectives are: To help participants demystify the Java
technology and the hype that surrounds it. To help managers and
developers understand the opportunities represented by this
emerging technology for a variety of applications. To provide a
roadmap for project managers and software engineers to help them
understand where Ada fits into the world of Java and how Ada can
provide a competitive advantage on the emerging Java platform.
To explain how one can write Ada applications for the Java
platform using the GNAT compiler which has recently been targeted
to this platform. The tutorial will contain down-to-earth
examples and a large number of demonstrations to help
participants acquire a concrete grasp of the concepts presented.
Franco Gasperoni is one of the founders of ACT-Europe, the
European GNAT company and a professor of Computer Sciences at the
ENST in Paris. Franco has been involved in compiler design and
implementation for over 10 years, first at IBM and then
participating to the development of the GNAT Ada 95 compilation
system from its inception. He is one of the main architects of
the GNAT-to-Java effort currently underway.
* Thursday 22 October 1998 : 14.00 17.30 (half-day)
Estimating Object-Oriented Ada Projects
Rob Day
This half-day tutorial targets professional software project
managers and their bosses, together with development team leaders
and process improvement/metrics personnel, who wish to gain a
better appreciation of the role of estimation in the planning and
management of large-scale object-oriented projects. The tutorial
is based upon the estimation method used in a proprietary OO
estimation tool, ODeT. The techniques presented have been
successfully applied to a large-scale Ada project. The tutorial
will be supported by the live creation of an estimate using
representative project data. Attendees will be able to modify
parameters to investigate the stability and credibility of the
estimate that has been produced.
Rob Day is a software project management consultant based in
England, specializing in the management, estimation and metrics
for large OO developments. Rob has been involved in structured
and object-oriented projects in the various roles of analyst,
project manager, reviewer, consultant, and instructor since 1985.
He has consulted and taught in the United States, France, Belgium
and Britain. His experience ranges across a considerable variety
of applications including defence, telecomms, aerospace, banking
and insurance.
CORBA and Real-Time CORBA Tutorial
Bill Beckwith
CORBA is a standard architecture that is highly useful for
building applications that need support for distributing pieces
of the applications, the ability to package software in to
separable components, or to interoperate among different
processor architectures, operating systems, or computer
languages. This tutorial will provide an overview of CORBA,
explain what CORBA is, where the standard comes from, which
vendors implement this standard, how developers typically use
vendors products, and where the OMG standards are headed. It will
also explain the IDL to Ada 95 mapping, present sample Ada 95
CORBA programs, and detail the entire implementation of a
complete Ada 95 CORBA application. Finally, the tutorial will
discuss the ramifications of using CORBA in real-time and
embedded systems, the current state of the OMG Real-Time CORBA
standard, and one particular Real-Time CORBA product, ORBexpress,
and some of the applications developed with this product.
Bill Beckwith is Chief Technology Officer for Objective Interface
Systems, Inc. Objective Interface develops and markets tools for
building high-performance distributed systems. Bill is one of
the founders of the company and is a member of the board of
directors. Bill is one of the authors of the OMG CORBA IDL to
Ada 95 mapping. His previous employers include Interbase,
Systems Center, UCCEL, STSC, and MCI.
*** Ada UK and Sponsorship
Ada UK was established in 1980 to promote the Ada programming
language and good Software Engineering practice. Ada UK is
grateful to its Sponsors for their financial support. The 1998
sponsors are ACT Europe, Aonix Europe Ltd, BAeSEMA, Datel
Ferranti Group plc, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Feabhas Ltd,
GEC-Marconi Radar & Defence Systems, Command & Information
Systems Division, Integrated Systems Inc. Ltd, IPL, LDRA Ltd,
McCabe & Associates, Praxis Critical Systems Ltd, Rational
Software Corporation, Real Time Products / Green Hills Software,
John Robinson & Associates, Ultra Electronics Ltd., Command & Control
Systems, Wind River Systems (UK) Ltd, York Software Engineering.