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 User Journal

Volume 35, issue 1 of Ada User Journal is being prepared for print, and I have started collecting material for issue 2. Members of Ada Europe should hopefully soon receive the first issue of the year in their mail boxes.

Ada Europe 2014 – 19^th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Paris (June 23^rd to 27^th 2014):

The Ada Europe conference on reliable software will take place in Paris this year. I have two items on the programme:

• A tutorial on contract-based programming in Ada 2012.
• A short presentation on privacy leaks in Java classes.

Registration for the conference opens March 17^th.

Recent activities:

POSIX file descriptors as Ada streams (March 2014):

A few days ago I wrote a small package wrapping a POSIX file descriptor (as declared in the POSIX.IO package from the POSIX Ada API) as an Ada stream. This allows you to stream Ada objects to/from any kind of file opened with the POSIX Ada API using just the standard stream attributes of Ada.

Some bioinformatics tools (February 2014):

I have collected a few of my bioinformatics tools in a publicly available repositories. So far there is a tool for counting base-pairs in DNA sequence files and one used to study the behaviour of mice through force time-series'.

Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2014, Bruxelles (February 1^st 2014):

I gave a tutorial on contract-based programming in Ada 2012 in the Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2014. The FOSDEM team is busy post-processing video recordings from the conference. I hope to be able to provide a link to a recording of my tutorial soon.

Photo blog software (January 2014):

I have started working on some software to replace my current Apache and Bash based photo blog. The project has been an opportunity to evaluate the GNATColl.SQL.ORM system from AdaCore. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it suits my purposes.

LEGO tools (November 2013):

I have extended my LEGO software toolbox with a filter I use when generating drafts for LEGO mosaics.

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.

See also earlier activities.