[FOSDEM] FOSDEM 2015 - Ada Developer Room - Sat 31 Jan 2015 - Brussels

[Dirk Craeynest]

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                 Ada-Belgium is pleased to announce its

                   Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2015

(Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting)

                        Saturday 31 January 2015

Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.), Solbosch Campus, Room S.AW1.124
     Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt Laan 50, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium

                Organized in cooperation with Ada-Europe

<http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/15/150131-fosdem.html>
              <http://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/ada/>

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The Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM)
is an annual event held in Brussels, Belgium, around early February.
The 2015 edition takes place on Saturday the 31st of January and Sunday
the 1st of February.  Ada-Belgium organized a series of presentations
related to Ada, to be held in a dedicated Developer Room, on the first
day of the event.

Ada is a general-purpose programming language originally designed
for safety- and mission-critical software engineering.  It is used
extensively in air traffic control, rail transportation, aerospace,
nuclear, financial services, medical devices, etc.  It is also
perfectly suited for open source development.  The latest Ada standard
was published by ISO in December 2012.  As with the Ada 1995 and Ada
2005 standards, the first full implementation of the new Ada 2012
standard was made available in the GNU Compiler Collection (GNAT).

This DevRoom aims to present the capabilities offered by the Ada
language (object-oriented, multicore, embedded programming) as well
as some of the many exciting tools and projects using Ada.

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Ada Developer Room Presentations (S.AW1.124, 59 seats)
--------------------------------

The Ada DevRoom program starts after the opening FOSDEM keynote,
runs from 11:00 to 19:00, and consists of 7 hours with 9 talks/demos
by 8 presenters from 5 different countries, plus 2 half-hour breaks
with informal discussions.

10:30-11:00 - Arrival & Informal Discussions

  Feel free to arrive early, to start the day with some informal
  discussions while the set-up of the DevRoom is finished.

11:00-11:05 - Welcome
              by Dirk Craeynest - Ada-Belgium

  Welcome to the Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2015, which is
  organized by Ada-Belgium in cooperation with Ada-Europe.
  Ada-Belgium and Ada-Europe are non-profit organizations set up
  to promote the use of the Ada programming language and related
  technology, and to disseminate knowledge and experience into
  academia, research and industry in Belgium and Europe, resp.
  Ada-Europe has member-organizations, such as Ada-Belgium, in various
  countries.  More information on this DevRoom is available on the
  Ada-Belgium web-site (see URL above).

11:05-11:55 - Ada, an Introduction
              by Jérémy Rosen - Open Wide

  This talk will introduce the Ada programming language to people
  used to more classical, weak-typed languages.  We will focus on
  how Ada uses its strong typing basis to prevent the most common
  programming errors at the language level, allowing the compiler
  to check them before they cause problems.

12:00-12:50 - Building a GUI for an Ada Application with GtkAda
              by Serge Vanschoenwinkel - Eurocontrol

  GTK+ is an open-source library that allows to quickly and easily
  build a graphical user interface, using standard widgets like
  buttons, combo boxes, text and tree views, scroll bars, etc.  Even
  though GTK+ is written in C, it can be used from an Ada application
  thanks to GtkAda, an object-oriented Ada/C binding.  Illustrated by
  a poker game application, this presentation will explain the
  essential concepts of GtkAda.  It will show how to create the most
  common widgets and how to interact with the user.

13:00-13:25 - Opening the Development of PHCpack
              by Jan Verschelde - University of Illinois at Chicago

  PHCpack originated from bundling programs to solve polynomial
  systems with symbolic-numeric and polyhedral methods.  The core of
  PHCpack consists mainly of Ada code, with interfaces to C and Python.
  Its blackbox solver is accessible from various scientific software
  packages such as Macaulay2, Maple, MATLAB, Octave, and Sage.
  The goal of the talk is to explain the application of software
  engineering principles and the role of Ada in the development
  of PHCpack.

13:30-14:00 - Informal Discussions

  A half-hour slot has been reserved for much needed interaction
  and informal discussion among Ada DevRoom participants and anyone
  potentially interested in Ada.

14:00-14:50 - Contract-based Programming
            - A Route to Finding Bugs Earlier
              by Jacob Sparre Andersen - JSA Research & Innovation

  Contract-based programming is a software development technique,
  which is used to find programming errors earlier in the development
  process.  "Contract" refers to formal declarations of how types and
  subprograms ("functions and methods" if you aren't an Ada programmer
  already) behave.  In the strictest form, the contracts are checked
  as a part of the compilation process, and only a program which
  can be proven to conform with the contracts will compile.  In a
  less strict form, it is more similar to "preventive debugging",
  where the contracts are inserted as run-time checks, which makes
  it more likely to identify errors during testing.  Ada provides a
  quite extensive support for contract-based programming.  The checks
  are specified as a mix of compile-time checks, obligatory run-time
  checks, and optional run-time checks.  In addition to that, SPARK
  defines a subset of Ada with full compile-time checks.

  The presentation will introduce the Ada features related to
  contract-based programming, and provide suggestions for how to
  make use of the features in practice.  It is organized in three
  main sections: type/object invariants; pre- and postconditions for
  operations; making the contracts for entire packages consistent.
  If there is time, the presentation will close with a live test
  of the guidelines on an example problem selected by the audience.
  The intended audience is anybody with enough programming experience
  to know concepts like types, encapsulation and packages.  Having seen
  source text in Pascal-like programming languages will be a benefit.

15:00-15:50 - Ada for ARM Bare Board
              by Tristan Gingold - AdaCore

  In 2014, AdaCore has released two new components in the GNAT GPL
  Edition: GNAT GPL for ARM Bare Board and SPARK 2014.  I present the
  content of GNAT GPL for ARM, its Ravenscar runtime, how to build
  and deploy an embedded application in Ada and how it was used to
  teach Ada.  Two different demos will be presented: a Tetris game
  and a train signalling system.  Both are fully written in Ada,
  with some parts written and proven with SPARK 2014.

16:00-16:50 - Multithreading Made Easy, part 3
            - Bounded Work Queues
              by Ludovic Brenta - Debian Project

  Ada is one of very few programming languages that support
  multithreading as part of the language, as opposed to libraries.
  In the previous two episodes, we showed how Ada makes it easy to turn
  a single-threaded program into a multi-threaded program.  We ended
  up with ten thousand threads working concurrently then introduced
  a task pool and work queue wherein a small number of threads (one
  per processor core) process thousands of small work units.  But the
  work queue could become very big.  In this third and last episode,
  we show how to restrict the size of the work queue to a fixed limit,
  thereby preventing denial-of-service attacks.

  This presentation will feature live editing of source code,
  compilation and debugging.  Questions from beginners are encouraged.
  It is not necessary to have attended the first installments.
  The sources of our example program will be provided to those who
  want to tinker with them.

17:00-17:50 - 2D Drawing with Ada and Cairo
              by Serge Vanschoenwinkel - Eurocontrol

  Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output
  devices.  It is designed to produce consistent output on all output
  media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration
  when available.  The Cairo API provides operations similar to
  the drawing operators of PostScript and PDF.  Operations in
  Cairo including stroking and filling cubic Bézier splines,
  transforming and compositing translucent images, and antialiased
  text rendering.  All drawing operations can be transformed by any
  affine transformation (scale, rotation, shear, etc.).  Illustrated by
  a poker game application, this presentation will show you how to
  do nice drawings with Cairo, still programming with your preferred
  language: Ada!

18:00-18:25 - Building Economic Simulations in Ada
              by Graham Stark - Virtual Worlds Research

  Virtual Worlds Research has been using Ada to build large scale
  economic simulations for 10 years now.  These simulations have been
  used by Governments and others to model the effects of, amongst
  other things, changing Legal Aid and reforming Social Care funding -
  many billions of pounds of annual spending.  Here, I discuss our
  experiences, good and bad, with the Ada language, and provide a
  live demonstration of the most recent model.  I'll also discuss
  work in progress to build a new forecasting model in association
  with the University of Southampton.

18:30-19:00 - Informal Discussions & Closing

  Informal discussion on ideas and proposals for future events.

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More information on Ada DevRoom 
-------------------------------

Speakers bios, pointers to relevant information, links to the FOSDEM
site, etc., are available on the Ada-Belgium site at
<http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/15/150131-fosdem.html>

We invite you to attend some or all of the presentations: they will
be given in English.  Everybody interested can attend FOSDEM 2015;
no registration is necessary.

We hope to see many of you there!

Dirk Craeynest
Dirk.Craeynest at cs.kuleuven.be (for Ada-Belgium/Ada-Europe/SIGAda/WG9)

Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm