The Ada Embedded Network is a small IPv4 network stack intended to run on STM32F746 or equivalent devices. This network stack is implemented in Ada 2012 and its architecture has been inspired by the BSD network architecture described in the book "TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2, The Implementation" by Gary R. Wright and W. Richard Stevens.

This article discusses the Ethernet Driver design and implementation. The IP protocol layer part will be explained in a next article.

The Ada Wiki Engine is a small Ada library that parses a Wiki text in several Wiki syntax such as MediaWiki, Creole, Markdown and renders the result either in HTML, text or into another Wiki format.

GCC 6.1 release has been announced recently by Jakub Jelinek and it is now time to build a new Ada compiler with it. The process to do that is not complex but contains a few pitfalls.

A new release is available for several Ada projects.

liblzma is a public domain general-purpose data compression library with a zlib-like API. liblzma is part of XZ Utils which includes a gzip-like command line tool named xz and some other tools. XZ Utils is developed and maintained by Lasse Collin. Major parts of liblzma are based on Igor Pavlov's public domain LZMA SDK. The Ada LZMA library provides an Ada05 thin binding for the liblzma library and it allows to use all the operations provided by the compression and decompression library.

Ada Web Application is a framework to build web applications.

The new version of AWA provides:

• New countries plugin to provide country/region/city data models
• New settings plugin to control application user settings
• New tags plugin to easily add tags in applications
• New <awa:tagList> and <awa:tagCloud> components for tag display
• Add tags to the question and blog plugins
• Add comments to the blog post

AWA can be downloaded at http://blog.vacs.fr/vacs/download.html

A live demonstration of various features provided by AWA is available at http://demo.vacs.fr/atlas

A small tutorial explains how you can easily setup a project, design the UML model, and use the features provided by the Ada Web Application framework.

A maintenance release is available for the following Ada packages:

Ada Utility Library: Version 1.7.1

• Support XmlAda 2014
• Fixed Get_Week_Start/Get_Week_End when the system timezone is different than the asked timezone

Download: http://download.vacs.fr/ada-util/ada-util-1.7.1.tar.gz

Ada EL: Version 1.5.1

• Fix minor configuration issue with GNAT 2014

Download: http://download.vacs.fr/ada-el/ada-el-1.5.1.tar.gz

Ada Security: Version 1.1.1

• Fix minor configuration issue with GNAT 2014

Download: http://download.vacs.fr/ada-security/ada-security-1.1.1.tar.gz

Ada Server Faces: Version 1.0.1

• Fix minor configuration issue with GNAT 2014
• Fix concurrent issues in facelet and session cache implementation

Download: http://download.vacs.fr/ada-asf/ada-asf-1.0.1.tar.gz

Ada Database Objects: Version 1.0.1

• Fix minor configuration issue with GNAT 2014

Download: http://download.vacs.fr/ada-ado/ada-ado-1.0.1.tar.gz

Dynamo: Version 0.7.1

• Fix minor configuration issue with GNAT 2014

Download: http://download.vacs.fr/dynamo/dynamo-0.7.1.tar.gz

This short article is a reminder to know the steps and actions in order to add a Ubuntu 14.04 build machine for Jenkins.

The steps are very similar to what I've described in Installation of FreeBSD for a jenkins build node. The virtual machine setup is the same (20G LVM partition, x86_64 CPU, 1Gb memory) and Ubuntu is installed from the ubuntu-14.04.1-server-i386.iso image.

Packages to build Ada software

The following commands install the GNAT Ada compiler with the libraries and packages to build various Ada libraries and projects including AWA.

# GNAT Compiler Installation
sudo apt-get install gnat-4.6 libaws2.10.2-dev libxmlada4.1-dev gprbuild gdb

# Packages to build Ada Utility Library
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev

# Packages to build Ada Database Objects
sudo apt-get install sqlite libsqlite3-dev
sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

# Packages to build libaws2-2-10
sudo apt-get install libasis2010-dev libtemplates-parser11.6-dev
sudo apt-get install texinfo texlive-latex-base \
 texlive-generic-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended 

The libaws2-2-10 package was not functional for me (see bug 1348902) so I had to rebuild the Debian package from the sources and install it.

Packages to create Debian packages

When the Ada build node is intended to create Debian packages, the following steps are necessary:

sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev gnupg reprepro pbuilder debhelper quilt chrpath
sudo apt-get install autoconf automake autotools-dev

Packages and setup for Jenkins

Before adding the build node in Jenkins, the JRE must be installed and a jenkins user must exist:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre subversion
sudo useradd -m -s /bin/bash jenkins

Jenkins will use ssh to connect to the build node so it is good practice to setup a private/public key to allow the Jenkins master node to connect to the slave. On the master, copy the jenkins user's key:

ssh-copy-id target-host

The Ada build node is then added through the Jenkins UI in Manage Jenkins/Manage Nodes.

Jenkins jobs

The jenkins master is now building 7 projects automatically for Ubuntu 14.04: Trusty Ada Jobs

After the creation and setup of the AWA project and the UML model design we have seen how to create a review for the review web application. In this new tutorial, you will understand the details to list the reviews that have been created and published.

In previous tutorials we have seen how to create and setup the project, design the UML model to generate the Ada implementation and the database schema. In this tutorial we will see how to design the page to create a review, implement the operations to create and populate the database with the new review.

In the Ada Web Application: Setting up the project we have seen how to create a new AWA project. In this second article, we will see how to design the UML model, generate the Ada code and create the database tables from our UML design.

Introduction

A Model driven engineering or MDE promotes the use of models to ease the development of software and systems. The Unified Modeling Language is used to modelize various parts of the software. UML is a graphical type modelling language and it has many diagrams but we are only going to use one of them: the Class Diagram.

The class diagram is probably the most powerful diagram to design, explain and share the data model of any application. It defines the most important data types used by an application with the relation they have with each other. In the class diagram, a class represents an abstraction that encapsulates data member attributes and operations. The class may have relations with others classes.

For the UML model, we are going to use ArgoUML that is a free modelization tool that works pretty well. For the ArgoUML setup, we will use two profiles:

• The Dynamo profile that describes the base data types for our UML model. These types are necessary for the code generator to work correctly.
• The AWA profile that describes the tables and modules provided by AWA. We will need it to get the user UML class definition.

These UML profiles are located in the /usr/share/dynamo/base/uml directory after Dynamo and AWA are installed. To configure ArgoUML, go in the Edit -> Settings menu and add the directory in the Default XMI directories list. Beware that you must restart ArgoUML to be able to use the new profiles.

Modelize the domain model in UML

The UML model must use a number of Dynamo artifacts for the code generation to work properly. The artifact describes some capabilities and behavior for the code generator to perform its work. Stereotype names are enclosed within markers. Dynamo uses the following stereotypes:

• The DataModel stereotype must be applied on the package which contains the model to generate. This stereotype activates the code generation (other packages are not generated).
• The Table stereotype must be applied to the class. It controls which database table and Ada type will be generated.
• The PK stereotype must be defined in at most one attribute of the class. This indicates the primary key for the database table. The attribute type must be an integer or a string. This is a limitation of the Ada code generator.
• The Version stereotype must be applied on the attribute that is used for the optimistic locking implementation of the database layer.

In our UML model, the Review table is assigned the Table stereotype so that an SQL table will be created as well as an Ada tagged type to represent our table. The id class attribute represents the primary key and thus has the PK stereotype. The version class attribute is the database column used by the optimistic locking implementation provided by ADO. This is why is has the Version stereotype. The title, site, create_date, text and allow_comments attributes represent the information we want to store in the database table. They are general purpose attributes and thus don't need any specific stereotype. For each attribute, the Dynamo code generator will generate a getter and a setter operation that can be used in the Ada code.

To tune the generation, several UML tagged values can be selected and added on the table or on a table attribute. By applying a stereotype to the class, several tagged values can be added. By selecting the Tagged Values tab in ArgoUML we can edit and setup new values. For the Review table, the dynamo.table.name tagged value defines the name of the SQL database table, in our case atlas_review.

The text attribute in the Review table is a string that can hold some pretty long text. To control the length of the SQL column, we can set the dynamo.sql.length tagged value and tell what is that length.

Once the UML model is designed, it is saved in the project directory uml. Dynamo will be able to read the ArgoUML file format (.zargo extension) so there is no need to export the UML in XMI.

The Review application UML model

The final UML model of our review application is fairly simple. We just added a table and a bean declaration. To benefit from the user management in AWA, we can use the AWA::Users::Models::User class that is defined in the AWA UML model. The reviewed-by association will create an attribute reviewer in our class. The code generator will generate a Get_Reviewer and Set_Reviewer operation in the Ada code. The SQL table will contain an additional column reviewer that will hold the primary key of the reviewer.

The Review_Bean class is an Ada Bean abstract class that will be generated by the code generator. The Bean stereotype activates the bean code generator and the generator will generate some code support that is necessary to turn the Review_Bean tagged record into an Ada Bean aware type. We will see in the next tutorial that we will only have to implement the save and delete operation that are described in this UML model.

Makefile setup

The Makefile.in that was generated by the Dynamo create-project command must be updated to setup a number of generation arguments for the UML to Ada code generator. Edit the Makefile.in to change:

DYNAMO_ARGS=--package Atlas.Reviews.Models db uml/atlas.zargo

The --package option tells Dynamo to generate only the model for the specified package. The db directory is the directory that will contain the SQL model files.

Once the Makefile.in is updated, the Makefile must be updated by using the following command:

./config.status

Or if you prefer, you may run again the configure script to re-configure the whole project.

We need the code

To run the generator, we can use the generate make target:

make generate

The Dynamo code generator reads the file uml/atlas.zargo and the UML model it contains and generates:

• the Ada package Atlas.Reviews.Models which contains the definition of the Review table. The model files are created in the directory src/models which is separate from your Ada sources.
• the SQL files to create the MySQL or SQLite database. Depending on the AWA modules which are used, the generated SQL files will contain additional tables that are used by the AWA modules. The SQL files are generated in the db/mysql and db/sqlite directories.

Let's create the database

Until now we designed our application UML model, we have our Ada code generated, but we need a database with the tables for our application. We can do this by using the create-database command in Dynamo. This command needs several arguments:

1. The directory that contains the SQL model files. In our case, this is db.
2. The information to connect to the database, the database name, the user and its password. This information is passed in the form of a database connection string.
3. The name of the database administration account to connect to the server and create the new database.
4. The optional password for the database administration account.

If the MySQL server is running on your host and the admin account does not have any password, you can use the following command:

dynamo create-database  db 'mysql://localhost/demo_atlas?user=demo&password=demo' root

The create-database creates the database (demo_atlas) with the tables that are necessary for the application. It also creates the demo user and give it the necessary MySQL grants to connect to the demo_atlas database.

The Review Web Application UML video

To help you in building the UML model and see who the whole process looks like in reality, I've created the following short video that details the above tutorial steps.

Conclusion

Thanks to ArgoUML and Dynamo, generating the Ada model and database tables becomes a simple and fun task. We have not written any line of code yet in this Review Web Application project, everything has been generated but we achieved a big progress:

• The Review Web Application server is built and can be launched,
• The database is initialized and contains our application data model schema.

The next tutorial will explain how to design the review form, implement the operations to create and populate the database with the new review.

Dynamo is a code generator used to generate Ada Web Application or database mappings.

• New project template to generate Gtk Ada application
• Register the new module in the application when they are added
• Update the current testsuite when new tests are added
• New stereotype for Ada bean generation
• Support for the creation of Debian packages
• New command add-form and add-module-operation

You can download the new version at http://download.vacs.fr/dynamo/dynamo-0.7.0.tar.gz

Ada Web Application is a complete framework that allows to write web applications using the Ada language. Through a complete web application, the tutorial explains various aspects in setting up and building an application by using AWA. The tutorial is split in several articles and they are completed by short videos to show how easy the whole process is.

The tutorial assumes that you have already installed the following software on your computer:

• The GNAT Ada compiler,
• The Eclipse and GNATbench plugin,
• The ArgoUML modelization tool,
• The Ada Web Application framework and its associated dependencies (XML/Ada and AWS),
• The Dynamo code generator.

The review web application

The review web application allows users to write reviews about a product, a software or a web site and share them to the Internet community. The community can read the review, participate by adding comments and voting for the reviewed product or software.

The AWA framework provides several modules that are ready to be used by our application. The login and user management is handled by the framework so this simplifies a lot the design of our application. We will see in the tutorial how we can leverage this to our review application.

Because users of our review web application have different roles, we will need permissions to make sure that only reviewers can modify a review. We will see how the AWA framework leverages the Ada Security library to enforce the permissions.

The AWA framework also integrates three other modules that we are going to use: the tags, the votes and the comments.

Since many building blocks are already provided by the Ada framework, we will be able to concentrate on our own review application module.

Project creation with Dynamo

The first step is to create the new project. Since creating a project from scratch is never easy we will use the Dynamo tool to build our initial review web application. Dynamo is a command line tool that provides several commands that help in several development tasks. For the project creation we will give:

• the output directory,
• the project name,
• the license to be used for the project,
• the project author's email address.

Choose the project name with care as it defines the name of the Ada root package that will be used by the project. For the license, you have the choice between GPL v2, GPL v3, MIT, BSD 3 clauses, Apache 2 or some proprietary license.

dynamo -o atlas create-project -l apache atlas Stephane.Carrez@gmail.com

(Of course, change the above email address by your own email address, this is an example!)

The Dynamo project creation will build the atlas directory and populate it with many files:

• A set of configure, Makefile, GNAT project files to build the project,
• A set of Ada files to build your Ada web application,
• A set of presentation files for the web application.

Once the project is created, we must configure it to find the Ada compiler, libraries and so on. This is done by the following commands:

cd atlas
./configure

At this step, you may even build your new project and start it. The make command will build the Ada files and create the bin/atlas-server executable that represents the web application.

make generate
make
bin/atlas-server

Once the server is started, you may point your browser to the following location: http://localhost:8080/atlas/index.html

Creating the review module with Dynamo

With the Ada Web Application framework, a web application is composed of modules where each module brings a specific functionality to the application. AWA provides a module for user management, another for comments, tags, votes, and many others. The application can decide to use these modules or not. The AWA module helps in defining the architecture and designing your web application.

For the review web application we will create our own module dedicated for the review management. The module will be an Ada child package of our root project package. From the Ada point of view, the final module will be composed of the following packages:

• A Modules package represents the business logic of the module. It is provides operations to access and manage the data owned by the module.
• A Beans package holds the Ada beans that make the link between the presentation layer and business logic.
• A Models package holds the data model to access the database content. This package is generated from UML and will be covered by a next tutorial.

To help in setting up a new AWA module, the Dynamo tool provides the add-module command. You just have to give the name of the module, which is the name of the Ada child package. Let's create our reviews module now:

dynamo add-module reviews

The command generates the new AWA module and modifies some existing files to register the new module in the application. You can build your web application at this stage even though the new module will not do anything yet for you.

Eclipse setup

Launch you Eclipse and create the new project by going to the File -> New -> Project menu. Choose the Ada Project and uncheck the Use default location checkbox so that you can browse your file system and select the atlas directory.

That's it. If everything went well, you should be able to see the projects files in the Eclipse project explorer.

The Review Web Application setup video

To help you in setting up and see how the whole process looks like in reality, I've created the following short video that details the above tutorial steps.

Conclusion

The whole process takes less than 3 minutes and gives you the basis to setup and build your new web application. The next tutorial will explain how to use the UML to design and generate the data model for our Review Web Application.

The Ada Database Objects is a library that allows to easily access database contents for Ada applications.

I've created and setup a Debian repository to give access to several Debian packages for several Ada projects that I manage. The goal is to provide some easy and ready to use packages to simplify and help in the installation of various Ada libraries. The Debian repository includes the binary and development packages for Ada Utility Library, Ada EL, Ada Security, and Ada Server Faces.

Access to the repository

The repository packages are signed with PGP. To get the verification key and setup the apt-get tool, you should run the following command:

wget -O - http://apt.vacs.fr/apt.vacs.fr.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

Ubuntu 13.04 Raring

A first repository provides Debian packages targeted at Ubuntu 13.04 raring. They are built with the gnat-4.6 package and depend on libaws-2.10.2-4 and libxmlada4.1-dev. Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list configuration:

deb http://apt.vacs.fr/ubuntu-raring raring main

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise

A second repository contains the Debian packages for Ubuntu 12.04 precise. They are built with the gnat-4.6 package and depend on libaws-2.10.2-1 and libxmlada4.1-dev. Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list configuration:

deb http://apt.vacs.fr/ubuntu-precise precise main

Installation

Once you've added the configuration line, you can install the packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libada-asf1.0

For the curious, you may browse the repository here.

Ada Server Faces is a framework that allows to create Web applications using the same design patterns as the Java Server Faces (See JSR 252, JSR 314, or JSR 344). The presentation pages benefit from the Facelets Web template system and the runtime takes advantages of the Ada language safety and performance.

A new release is available with several features that help writing online applications:

• Add support for Facebook and Google+ login
• Javascript support for popup and editable fields
• Added support to enable/disable mouseover effect in lists
• New EL function util:iso8601
• New component <w:autocomplete> for input text with autocompletion
• New component <w:gravatar> to render a gravatar image
• New component <w:like> to render a Facebook, Twitter or Google+ like button
• New component <w:panel> to provide collapsible div panels
• New components <w:tabView> and <w:tab> for tabs display
• New component <w:accordion> to display accordion tabs
• Add support for JSF <f:facet>, <f:convertDateTime>, <h:doctype>
• Support for the creation of Debian packages

You can try the online demonstration of the new widget components and download this new release at http://download.vacs.fr/ada-asf/ada-asf-1.0.0.tar.gz

The Ada Security library provides a security framework which allows applications to define and enforce security policies. This framework allows users to authenticate by using OpenID Authentication 2.0, OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect protocols.

The new version brings the following improvements:

• New authentication framework that supports OpenID, OpenID Connect, OAuth, Facebook login
• AWS demo for a Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Google+ authentication
• Support to extract JSON Web Token (JWT)
• Support for the creation of Debian packages

The library can be downloaded at http://download.vacs.fr/ada-security/ada-security-1.1.0.tar.gz

Ada EL is a library that implements an expression language similar to JSP and JSF Unified Expression Languages (EL). The expression language is the foundation used by Java Server Faces and Ada Server Faces to make the necessary binding between presentation pages in XML/HTML and the application code written in Java or Ada.

The presentation page uses an UEL expression to retrieve the value provided by some application object (Java or Ada). In the following expression:

#{questionInfo.question.rating}

the EL runtime will first retrieve the object registered under the name questionInfo and look for the question and then rating data members. The data value is then converted to a string.

The new release is available for download at http://download.vacs.fr/ada-el/ada-el-1.5.0.tar.gz

This version brings the following improvements:

• EL parser optimization (20% to 30% speed up)
• Support for the creation of Debian packages

Ada Utility Library is a collection of utility packages for Ada 2005. A new version is available which provides:

• Added a text and string builder
• Added date helper operations to get the start of day, week or month time
• Support XmlAda 2013
• Added Objects.Datasets to provide list beans (lists of row/column objects)
• Added support for shared library loading
• Support for the creation of Debian packages
• Update Ahven integration to 2.3
• New option -r <test> option for the unit test harness to execute a single test
• Port on FreeBSD

It has been compiled and ported on Linux, Windows, Netbsd, FreeBSD (gcc 4.6, GNAT 2013, gcc 4.7.3). You can download this new version at http://download.vacs.fr/ada-util/ada-util-1.7.0.tar.gz.

A few days ago, I did a fresh installation of my Jenkins build environment for my Ada projects (this was necessary after a disk crash on my OVH server). I took this opportunity to setup a FreeBSD build node. This article is probably incomplete but tends to collect a number of tips for the installation.

Virtual machine setup

The FreeBSD build node is running within a QEMU virtual machine. The choice of the host turns out to be important since not all versions of QEMU are able to run a FreeBSD/NetBSD or OpenBSD system. There is a bug in QEMU PCI emulation that prevents the NetBSD network driver to recognize the emulated network cards (See qemu-kvm 1.0 breaks openbsd, netbsd, freebsd). Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 provide a version of Qemu that has the problem. This is solved in Ubuntu 13.04, so this is the host linux distribution that I've installed.

For the virtual machine disk, I've setup some LVM partition on the host as follows:

sudo lvcreate -Z n -L 20G -n freebsd vg01

this creates a disk volume of 20G and label it freebsd.

The next step is to download the FreeBSD Installation CD (I've installed the FreeBSD-10.0-RC2). To manage the virtual machines, one can use the virsh command but the virt-manager graphical front-end provides an easier setup.

sudo virt-manager

The virtual machine is configured with:

CPU: x86_64

• Memory: 1048576
• Disk type: raw, source: /dev/vg01/freebsd
• Network card model: e1000
• Boot on the CD image

After the virtual machine starts, the FreeBSD installation proceeds (it was so simple that I took no screenshot at all).

Post installation

After the FreeBSD system is installed, it is almost ready to be used. Some additional packages are added by using the pkg install command (which is very close to the Debian apt-get command).

pkg install jed
pkg install sudo bash tcpdump

By default the /proc is not setup and some application like the OpenJDK need to access it. Edit the file /etc/fstab and add the following lines:

fdesc   /dev/fd         fdescfs         rw      0       0
proc    /proc           procfs          rw      0       0

and mount the new partitions with:

mount -a

GNAT installation

The FreeBSD repository provides some packages for Ada development. They are easily installed as follows:

pkg install gmake
pkg install gnat-aux-20130412_1 gprbuild-20120510
pkg install xmlada-4.4.0.0_1 zip-ada-45
pkg install aws-3.1.0.0
pkg install gdb-7.6.1_1

After the installation, change the path and setup the ADA_PROJECT_PATH variables to be able to use gnatmake:

export PATH=/usr/local/gcc-aux/bin:$PATH
export ADA_PROJECT_PATH=/usr/local/lib/gnat

Jenkins slave node installation

Jenkins uses a Java application that runs on each build node. It is necessary to install some Java JRE. To use subversion on the build node, we must make sure to install some 1.6 version since the 1.8 and 1.7 version have incompatibilities with the Jenkins master. The following packages are necessary:

pkg install openjdk6-jre-b28_7
pkg install subversion-1.6.23_2

Jenkins needs a user to connect to the build node. The user is created by the adduser command. The Jenkins user does not need any privilege.

Jenkins master will use SSH to connect to the slave node. During the first connection, it installs the slave.jar file which manages the launch of remote builds on the slave. For the SSH connection, the password authentication is possible but I've setup a public key authentication that I've setup on the FreeBSD node by using ssh-copy-id.

At this stage, the FreeBSD build node is ready to be added on the Jenkins master node (through the Jenkins UI Manage Jenkins/Manage Nodes).

MySQL Installation

The MySQL installation is necessary for some of my projects. This is easily done as follows:

pkg install mysql55-server-5.5.35 mysql55-client-5.5.35

Then add the following line to /etc/rc.conf

mysql_enable="YES"

and start the server manyally:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server onestart

The database tables are setup during the first start.

Other packages

Some packages that are necessary for some projets:

pkg install autoconf-2.69 curl-7.33.0_1
pkg install ImageMagick-nox11-6.8.0.7_3

Jenkins jobs

The jenkins master is now building 7 projects automatically for FreeBSD 10: FreeBSD Ada Jobs