Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation

Project samples: Language-server for an on-line game | Analytical model of leveraged equity investment | Efficient, low-impact persistence implementation | PBX and reception management system

My company supplies services in these fields:

Software innovations; new business use of existing software technology, and development of new programming techniques.
Software design and source code review.
Mathematical Modelling.
Design and development of language-aware software, spell-checkers, and text-mining tools.
Lectures on Complex Systems.
Talks on Ada and parallelising programs as well as Linux and other Open Source systems.
Analysis of and data processing for biological experiments.
Analytical models of investments, models of the financial system, and other models related to finance.

Upcoming activities:

Ada-DK open monthly meetings, Farum:: We meet the first Tuesday of every month to discuss and explore Ada programming techniques and reliable software development in general.
Ada User Journal (volume 35 number 1): I am working on the news summary for issue number 1 of volume 35 of Ada User Journal.
Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2014, Bruxelles (February 1^st 2014):: Again next year there will be an Ada Developers Room at FOSDEM in Bruxelles.
Ada Europe 2014 – 19^th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Paris (June 23^rd to 27^th 2014):: Next year the Ada Europe conference on reliable software will take place in Paris. I look forward to participate. The deadline for submitting regular papers and tutorial and workshop proposals is on December 15^th (i.e. really soon). The deadline for submitting industrial presentation proposals is on January 19^th.

Recent activities:

Build and test setup (November 2013):: I have refined and published my build and test "framework". The repository represents a generalised version of my (currently) preferred arrangement of the building and testing of an Ada project.
Database interfacing with GNATColl (October 2013):: I am spending some time studying and experimenting with the GNATColl database interfacing facilities. So far one of the public results of this is an example of how (not) to link pairs of rows in a table together. The documentation for the gnatcoll_db2ada tool was not quite obvious (for me).
DANSAS'13 (August 23^rd 2013):: I gave a presentation titled Contract-based Programming with Ada 2012 - an Experience Report at this year's Danish Static Analysis Symposium.

The 2012 version of the Ada programming language standard includes checked "contracts" and "aspects" for subprograms and types. Some of these are by definition checked at compile-time, while other checks can be postponed to run-time, if a static analysis is unfeasible (or just not implemented).

At AdaHeads, we are currently developing a hosted telephone reception system, where the core component is written in Ada 2012. We picked Ada 2012 specifically to be able to use the contracts and aspects to increase our confidence that the software is correct.

Our experience so far is that GNAT-GPL-2013 (the only generally available Ada 2012 compiler) only implements static (compile-time) checking of contracts and aspects where it is required by the language standard. This means that for now, the big static analysis benefits of using Ada are related to the basic type system, which also existed in earlier versions of the standard, and the major benefit of switching to Ada 2012 at the moment is in the improved run-time checks.
Ada Europe 2013 – 18^th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Berlin (June 10^th to 14^th 2013):: I gave a presentation titled Alice in Adaland at this year's Ada Europe conference earlier today.
Mathematics and Statistics Library (May 24^th 2013):: Extended my mathematics and statistics library with an (old) least squares fit implementation from my still unpublished Ada source text collection.
Open Source Days 2013, Copenhagen (March 9^th and 10^th 2013):: I gave a talk on Parallel Programming Patterns at the conference Open Source Days in Copenhagen.
Published a (partial) UDP-based client/server implementation of the game Tron (March 8^th 2013):: As it seemed like there aren't many examples of Ada programs using UDP, I have published an old toy example using UDP to exchange game state between players and game-master in the game Tron.
OpenID client for the Ada Web Server library (AWS) (March 2013):: My AdaHeads colleague Thomas Løcke and I are preparing my port of the Ada Server Faces OpenID implementation to AWS for inclusion in the main branch of AWS.