Ada Resource Association

Australian healthcare informatics company SmartWard Pty Ltd has adopted AdaCore’s GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment and CodePeer static analysis tool to implement their patient care management system. This system needs to be highly reliable and secure from unauthorized users while providing real-time response in an easy to use format. AdaCore’s tools were determined to be the best solution for meeting these requirements.

AdaCore has a long history of providing Ada-based software development tools for a wide range of safety-critical systems, and now provides a competitive advantage for medical applications such as SmartWard where the concept of a ‘fatal error’ may be literally true.

AdaCore today announced the release of its latest Ada cross-development environment, GNAT Pro 7.2, for ARM Cortex processors running Android. This GNAT Pro product, hosted on Windows and Linux, comprises a complete Ada toolsuite for developing and maintaining Android applications using a mixture of Ada and Java. Developers can now exploit the software engineering benefits of the Ada language, while also taking advantage of the Java libraries and services provided by the Android platform. Applications can also be written solely in Ada, or in a combination of Ada and other “native” languages. Android 2.3 and later versions are supported, on Cortex A8 and above.

AdaCore today announced a new target platform for the latest version of its GNAT Pro Safety-Critical Ada Development Environment. Hosted on Windows workstations, GNAT Pro Safety-Critical V7.2 is now targeted to the LynuxWorks LynxOS-178 V2.2.2 RTOS for PowerPC, and supports both ARINC-653 APEX partitions and POSIX pthreads. GNAT Pro Safety-Critical includes the standard GNAT Pro components – the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) and GNATbench IDEs and accompanying toolset – along with specialized tools and run-time libraries oriented towards applications that have to meet demanding software safety standards, such as DO-178B or DO-178C for avionics. With GNAT Pro Safety-Critical for LynxOS-178, developers who need to deliver high-assurance applications on this LynuxWorks RTOS now have an integrated and full-functioned toolsuite that implements all versions of the Ada language, including Ada 2012, and is backed by AdaCore’s expert support.

This GNAT Pro ARM product provides a complete Ada development environment oriented towards embedded systems that require the flexibility and extensive services provided by Linux. Developers of such systems can now exploit the software engineering benefits of the Ada language, including reliability, maintainability, and portability.

AdaCore today announced the next major release of its Ada development environment, GNAT Pro 7.2. This latest GNAT Pro toolsuite incorporates more than 120 new features, many of which are based on customer suggestions. This latest GNAT Pro toolsuite includes several new tools, is available on additional platforms, implements the Ada 2012 language standard by default, and extends its coverage of ARM configurations.

CodePeer 2.3 is the latest version of AdaCore’s static analysis tool for the automated review and validation of Ada source code. CodePeer assesses potential bugs before program execution to find errors efficiently and early in the development life cycle. It also performs impact and vulnerability analysis when existing code is modified, and, using control-flow, data-flow and other advanced static analysis techniques, the tool detects problems that would otherwise only be found through labor-intensive debugging.

GNATcoverage 1.2 is the latest version of AdaCore’s source and object code coverage analysis tool. GNATcoverage does not require instrumentation of the executable, and this new product release supports usage with an iSystem hardware probe generating Nexus trace data, as well as usage with Valgrind on Linux.

AdaCore today announced the adoption of its GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment by Deep Blue Capital (DBC), a propriety trading firm. DBC rotates teams through the world time zones at their Amsterdam-based offices to trade twenty-four hours a day, 7 days a week on all of the world’s major stock exchanges. DBC employs algorithmic trading systems developed in Ada with AdaCore’s GNAT Pro development environment; these systems gather market information and automatically send buy and sell orders with minimal human intervention. DBC, a small company with fewer than twenty employees, can operate globally because of its efficient and reliable software.

The Institute for Internet Technologies and Applications at the University of Applied Science in Rapperswil (Switzerland) and AdaCore today announced a significant expansion of the Open Source software model into the domain of high-assurance systems with the preview release of the Muen Separation Kernel. The Muen Kernel enforces a strict and robust isolation of components to shield security-critical functions from vulnerable software running on the same physical system. To achieve the necessary level of trustworthiness, the Muen team used the SPARK language and toolset to formally prove the absence of run-time errors.

NEW YORK, PARIS, & BATH, United Kingdom–Today, AdaCore and Altran announced a new space application for the GNAT Pro technology and SPARK language toolset, with the successful launch of Vermont Technical College’s Lunar CubeSat. The tiny satellite, measuring only 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm and weighing 1.1 kg, was launched into a 500 km earth orbit, where it will remain for about three years to test the systems that will be used for the eventual lunar mission. The CubeSat project is part of NASA’s ELaNa IV program (Educational Launch of Nano-satellites).

The CubeSat’s navigation and control software was developed in SPARK/Ada using AdaCore’s GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) IDE and GNAT Pro compiler and exploiting Altran’s SPARK toolset to prove the absence of run-time errors. The software was developed at Vermont Technical College by a team of undergraduate students under the direction of Dr. Peter Chapin. Although they had no previous knowledge of SPARK or Ada, the students came up to speed quickly and were able to take advantage of SPARK’s various annotations to produce robust code.

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