Ada Resource Association

AdaCore has launched a blog to provide an insight into the AdaCore ecosystem. The blog will cover both technical and less-technical topics (such as the business of Open Source software). The blog can be found at blog.adacore.com.

AdaCore today announced the preview release of GNATdashboard, a new tool that serves as a control panel for monitoring and improving the quality of Ada software. GNATdashboard feeds code quality information from AdaCore’s tools to the open source SonarQube code quality management platform and Squoring Technologies’ SQUORE quality and performance decision support solution.

“For the first time, a tool focused on software quality assessment and management is available for Ada developers. It’s designed to help users understand their technical debt – which is essentially the price one pays for choices such as design decisions that make it difficult to implement changes later.”

SIGAda has made a new set of “Powered by Ada” posters available, featuring the Rosetta and VTC Cubesat spacecrafts. All are available as high-quality PDFs.

AdaCore’s GNAT Pro cross-development environment has been selected by the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid / UPM), for the UPMSat-2 UNION satellite project’s real-time on-board and ground control software. The 50kg micro-satellite, scheduled to be launched in Q4 2015, will provide a technology demonstration platform for the university from a sun-synchronous orbit nearly 600 km above Earth.

AdaCore’s CodePeer advanced static analysis tool for the automated review and validation of Ada source code has been qualified as a software verification tool for developers in both avionics and railway industries.

AdaCore has released a freely downloadable version of its GNAT GPL Ada cross-development environment for Bare Board ARM Cortex processors. Developers of non-proprietary software can now exploit Ada 2012’s reliability, safety and security benefits for ARM applications.

GNAT GPL for Bare Board ARM Cortex processors provides a complete Ada 2012 development environment, including a comprehensive tool-chain and GPS, AdaCore’s flagship Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It also includes a fully configurable/customizable run-time library consisting of the “Small Footprint” (SFP) and Ravenscar profiles that are particularly relevant to safety-critical systems. The SFP profile corresponds to a language subset with minimal GNAT run-time routines, and the Ravenscar profile is a subset of the Ada concurrency features with an efficient, predictable, small-footprint implementation. The resulting Ada subset has expressive power well beyond that of other languages used for ARM-based devices.

Members of the SPARK team from Altran UK will be attending the Ada-Europe 2014 conference to exhibit, present information about the SPARK technology, and provide a full-day tutorial about the SPARK language. They will be featuring the recently released next generation of the SPARK toolset which includes support for the latest version of the language, SPARK 2014.

On Friday 27th June, Altran UK will be presenting one of the tutorial sessions in collaboration with our partners, AdaCore: Introduction to Verification with SPARK 2014. This tutorial will provide a broad overview of the SPARK 2014 language as well as an introduction to one of the most novel features of the language – the dual nature of the contracts as both executable and mathematical statements and how these can be verified by testing, proof, or a combination of the two. In the afternoon, the tutorial will look at the more advanced features of the language and toolset that are essential for industrial-scale specification. The tutorial will include hands-on exercises using the SPARK toolset.

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.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, May 12, 2014. Ada-Europe today announced the publication in extra formats of the 2012 version of the Ada programming language standard, after its formal approval by ISO/IEC JTC 1 in December 2012.

Since its standardization, the Ada 2012 standard has been available in HTML and Adobe Acrobat format (PDF), from the download sites [1] and [2]. More recently, the latest Ada language definition became also available as volume 8339 of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series [3], as a companion to the Ada 2012 Rationale, published by Springer as LNCS 8338.

Moreover, with a view to exploring new media platforms to further widen the availability of this important material, Ada-Europe has now produced a prototype eBook of the Ada 2012 Reference Manual, which can be downloaded from [1]. This eBook should be regarded as a draft concept, proposed for the scrutiny of the Ada community at large, for feedback on its perceived usefulness and suggestions for improvements. Returns on this subject should be addressed to Ada-Europe at board@ada-europe.org.

[1] http://www.ada-europe.org/resources/online
[2] http://www.adaic.org/ada-resources/standards/ada12
[3] http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/book/978-3-642-45418-9

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.