updated 19 September, 1999

Workshop Coordinators:
Ed Colbert, Absolute Software
Mark Gerhardt, TimeSys Corporation
 

A real-time pattern is collaboration scheme between components where timeliness of response is a major concern, whether deadline-, event-, periodic-, or statistically-driven.  These patterns emphasize concurrency, scheduling, and resource sharing issues.  Ada's concurrency and cooperation model (including the real-time annex) can characterize and express these patterns.  The goal of this workshop is to develop examples of real-time patterns and of how to characterize such pattern.

To participate, submit either a pattern for real-time design, or a one-page paper describing an issue related to patterns for real-time design.  If we have more than 20 submissions, the authors of the best submissions will be invited to participate.  We welcome people that are new or unfamiliar with Ada to bring Patterns into this arena.
 

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Workshop Coordinator:
Alexy Khrabrov, University of Pennsylvania

Ada Standard Component Library, or ASCL, is an initiative to provide a robust, cohesive, general-purpose library of Algorithms and Data Structures (ADS) for Ada 95.  ASCL must provide and exceed the functionality similar to C++/STL and Java standard library.

The workshop will be a bootstrapping effort to speed up ASCL formalization process.  Two bodies of the existing knowledge and experience will be reviewed and discussed: existing ADS component architectures and libraries for Ada, and those for other languages, notably Java and C++.  The standardization focus means distilling the best of the design decisions for ASCL and planning its adoption.

The workshop will strive to finalize the bulk of the architectural decisions in order to allow drafting the actual specifications of ADS packages.  The workshop is open to all conference participants; future ASCL team members welcome.

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Workshop Coordinator:
Currie Colket, MITRE,
Chair ASISWG/ASISRG

The primary purpose of this Workshop is to address a framework to support the development of ASIS Extensions for higher level abstractions.

The primary focus of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) Working Group and ASIS Rapporteur Group has been to evolve ASIS as an interface to the Ada 95 compilation environment. ASIS now provides a powerful mechanism to perform code analysis for mission-critical, high-integrity, and safety-critical applications. A variety of highly effective tools have been built using ASIS. This interface was approved as an ISO standard in 1999 and is known as:

ISO/IEC 15291:1999 Information technology
 * Programming languages  * Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS)

At SIGAda'98, the ASIS Workshop focused on where do we go from here.  A principal concern was the issue of ASIS extensions to support the development of higher level abstractions. Extensions to the ASIS specification may be required for a host of valid reasons. The principal reason identified was:

Provide higher level abstractions to increase productivity and effectiveness of the ASIS tool developer. The ASIS interfaces reflect the low-level syntactic level of the source code. A higher level abstraction might incorporate a number of ASIS queries. Such higher level abstractions could be useful to different classes of tool developers to support specialized requirements (e.g., additional OO analysis, static run-time analysis). These interfaces should be implementable using the standard ASIS interfaces. For ASIS 83, the Program View Layer (PVL) was developed to provide such abstractions. The PVL was implemented in 100% ASIS 83 interfaces, thus making the secondary layer portable across ASIS implementations. Such a secondary layer has not been developed or defined for ASIS 95.

These abstractions raise a number of issues, such as:

• Should there be a recognized taxonomy?
• Should there be conventions useful for all vendors and implementors?
• Should we develop a voluntary standard for such conventions?

Since the SIGAda'98 ASIS Workshop, ASIS for Ada95 extensions have been developed and are available on the ASIS Home Page. This is an excellent time to address the needs of emerging ASIS extensions.

Participants from the compiler vendor community, tool vendor community, and user community will be asked to identify ASIS higher level abstraction needs for extensions. The workshop will address voluntary naming conventions, and a possible taxonomy for categorizing extensions to facilitate their selection/use.  Hopefully their thoughts will trigger your ideas to identify things the ASIS Community should be doing to better support the Ada community.

As last year, the results will be published in Ada Letters, and will guide the activities of the ASIS community for years to come.  Your input will be extremely valuable in planning your future. Please plan on coming.

For last year's report, please see:  
"Workshop Report: ASIS - Where Do We Go From Here? 
6-10 PM, Sunday, 8 November 1998, 
SIGAda'98, Washington, D.C.",
Ada Letters, Volume XIX, No. 1, March 1999, p.42.

To get a better idea, the report can be found at =>

http://www.acm.org/sigada/WG/asiswg/SIGAda98-ASIS-WS-Report.doc ]
 

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Workshop Coordinator:
Robert C. Leif, Ada_Med, a Division of Newport Instruments
 

The focus of this Workshop will be on extending the use of Ada into the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) domain. The spectacular rise of JAVA has proven that it was and is possible to replace the dominant computer language.

The complexity, inefficiency, and the lack of reliability of today's commercial software provides a great business opportunity. If Ada were launched as a brand-new programming language which facilitates and expedites the creation of reliable, efficient, portable software that worked on clients, servers, and the Web; it would be a very hot new issue on today's (July, 1999) US stock exchange. The goal of this Workshop is to determine what should we do to both make Ada the dominant language for COTS and profit by doing so?

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