****** 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.