This website is dedicated to promoting the use of Ada95 as a major language for programming Web and Internet applets and applications, servers and browsers.


WebAda Site : an Ada compiler and development facilities available over the Web. Not AppletMagic yet, but soon.

Downloadable Beta release of the AppletMagictm compiler


Introduction

Intermetrics has recently announced an Ada95 compiler targetted to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that is in the process of becoming an important part of the World Wide Web technology. The Java High-Order Language defined by Sun is intended to compile to an executable bytecode, sometimes called j-code, that can be downloaded from a WWW server to clients and executed interpretively. This makes possible hypermedia displays that are highly dynamic or interactive without a high volume of communications back to the server.

The original intention of Java was to be used to code applets, relatively small pieces of code that are downloaded as part of HTML files to animate browser displays or make them interactive. Running this way, the j-code must be given an extremely restricted set of local resources to prevent security holes. It has lately been suggested that j-code will also be used to write full applications and run with more facilities available; such applications would be portable to all platforms for which j-code interpreters and JVM support have been written, potentially all major platforms.

The existance of the Intermetrics compiler and the high level of suitability of Ada95 for Web programming represents a tremendous opportunity to make Ada a much more widely-used, mainstream language. This will not happen automatically, but likewise will not require major efforts or major funding by vendors or the DoD. A number of relatively small efforts by institutions and individuals will help Ada "catch on" with the large community of programmers who will be writing Web code.

A Birds-Of-A-Feather (BOF) session was held at Tri-Ada 95 on November 9th in Anaheim. Some activities were suggested at that time; others are listed below.

Things We Need to do Immediately

Things We can Do/Ideas to Think About

Resources

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Last Update: 10/29/96 09:20