Software Engineering Projects—Ada (CIS-2730) Home Page

This is the home page for Peter Chapin's Software Engineering Projects course notes for the Spring 2022 semester. Here you will find electronic versions of class handouts, homework assignments, lecture slides, and links to other references of interest. If you are a student taking Software Engineering Projects you should bookmark this page.

The course syllabus gives an overview of the course and its content, lists course resources, and describes the grading policy and related issues.
The homework submission area and grade book are on Canvas but all other course resources are here.
During this course we will be working on secure timestamp server that implements RFC-3161 called Thumper.
My home page contains other resources of potential interest.

Topic Summary

The lectures for this course are on Zoom. The labs for this course are face-to-face.

2022-01-18 (1). Overview of the course and of the Ada technology that we will be covering.
2022-01-18 (2). More introduction of Ada and an introduction to the tools we'll be using in lab and for the project.
2022-01-25 (1). Discussed the "Hello" program and the "Sum" program, along with its C equivalent.
2022-01-25 (2). Discussed a few other programs from the TutorialAda repository (Prime, Prime2, Prime_Factor). Introduced Ada packages and subtypes.
2022-02-01 (1). Discussed how to create a package using a Calendar_Dates example. In this lecture issues related to the specification are discussed.
2022-02-01 (2). Continued to discussion from earlier, this time focusing on issues related to the body.
2022-02-08 (1). Discussed the solution to Lab #2 and some of the subtleties involved in computing the Logarithmic Integral. Introduced postconditions.
2022-02-08 (2). Introduced SPARK using the Buffers package.
2022-02-14 (1). Described the Thumper project in more detail: what it is, how it is organized, etc. Also reviewed Lab #5.
2022-02-15 (2). Demonstrated the Thumper code as it currently exists (client, server, test programs). Demonstrated SPARK as applied to the Network.Addresses package.
2022-03-01 (1). Some discussion of version control etiquette. Discussed the timestamp protocol used by Thumper in detail.
2022-03-01 (2). Discussed ASN.1 and looked at some of the Hermes code in the Thumper project related to the upcoming lab.
2022-03-08 (1). Discussed the Thumper documentation. Started code walk-through of the Thumper server.
2022-03-08 (2). Continued walk-through of the Thumper server and client.
2022-03-15 (1). Discussed various TODO items in the Thumper project in preparation for everyone selecting a part of the project on which to work.
2022-03-15 (2). Continued discussing the TODO items in the Thumper project.
2022-03-22 (1). Discussed and demonstrated interfacing Ada to C library functions.
2022-03-22 (2). Continued discussing interfacing Ada to C library functions, showing how structures and strings (character arrays) can be handled.
2022-03-29 (1). Introduced and discussed Ada tasking.
2022-03-29 (2). Continued discussing Ada tasking.
2022-04-12 (1). Introduced continuous integration (GitHub actions, Jenkins, etc.)
2022-04-12 (2). Continued discussing continuous integration.
2022-04-19 (1). Demonstrated SPARK on CubedOS.Lib.XDR.
2022-04-19 (2). No class.
2022-04-26 (1). Discussed the art of giving presentations.
2022-04-26 (2). No class.
2022-05-03. Thumper project presentations.

Slides

Nobody Uses Ada
Introduction
Formal Presentations (the "meta-presentation")

Labs

The lab set is summarized in the lab summary document, along with links to specific lab handouts and supporting code samples.

Resources/Articles

I have some notes for macOS users about the availability of Ada tools.
The GitHub Desktop provides a graphical interface to using Git repositories on GitHub.
The command line Git tool can be used as an alternative to the GUI desktop program. I have a brief introduction to using the Git command line that might be helpful.
The Git Book. This book about Git can be freely downloaded.
If you want to use Visual Studio Code instead of GNATstudio, be sure to review this tutorial from AdaCore about how to set it up.
AdaCore has prepared a website with tutorial information about Ada and SPARK.
I have my own tutorial about Ada that I am working on. You may find it helpful since I present the concepts in a similar way as I do in class.
The comp.lang.ada newsgroup is a place where all things Ada is discussed.
Stack Overflow has an [ada] tag for Ada related questions.
Libera Chat is an IRC network that contains a #ada channel for real-time Ada discussion.
The Ada Information Clearinghouse is a good starting point for information about Ada on the web.
Ada Wikibook.
The Big Book of Linux Ada Programming. Chapter 10 gives an overview Ada's fine-grained features. The examples in this book tend to be complete programs.
John English's Ada 95: The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming. Despite the title, this book covers a lot of "basic" Ada. The OOP aspects of Ada play a minor role in the presentation.
Ada Distilled. A freely downloadable PDF that describes Ada for people with some programming experience.
The Git book contains a good section on how to contribute to projects on GitHub using topic branches and pull requests.