Form U123-0394 MOBLCOMM.TXT
Ada Information Clearinghouse, 1-800-AdaIC-11 (232-4211), 703/685-1477
ABB Nera, its roots dating back 111 years ago is a telecommunications company with annual sales of more than $200 Millions. Its Satcom division dedicates itself to develop, manufacture and market Inmarsat Mobile Satellite terminals and Land earth stations for voice, fax and data communications. Its worldwide activities address the needs of ship owners, companies which use mobile communications in their business, international organizations which use mobile communication systems while operating in remote countries, and telecom administrations.
The Ada development consists of mobile terminals for Inmarsat-M and Inmarsat-B systems providing, voice, fax and data services into the international telephone networks directly from the mobile terminals. These systems are performing access control, monitoring and alarm handling antenna steering, man-machine interface and handling of all the satellite protocols.
The application was entirely developed in Ada. Using the Alsys development environment for PC and HP targeting Motorola 68302, a 6-person team developed about 110,000 lines of code. The overall development represents an effort of 18000 man hours. SDL was used to specify and design the application.
"Ada was chosen because we wanted to use a modern specification oriented language with object-oriented support as well as support for built-in checks" mentions Mr. Arne Birkeland, Project Manager, who conducted the development of the application. After comparisons, Ada proved to be more accepted than Modula 2 and most of all, has a better support than C and PLM for object orientation and built-in checks.
With regard to Alsys, Mr. Birkeland states that Alsys has good support for PC and is well known for the quality of its technology. He especially liked the "good parser and error print-out of the Alsys environment". "The support was appropriate to our needs and enabled us to sort out all the problems encountered" he adds. Alsys consultants provided the support ABB Nera needed and Alsys training courses made "novices in Ada able to start quickly" concludes Mr. Birkeland.
With regard to the future, ABB Nera plans to port the development environment to SPARCstation to do development combined with PC's. The coming of Ada 9X is of great interest to them, "especially the Ada 9X Object Oriented Programming features" states Mr. Birkeland.
Thanks to Mr. Arne Birkeland from ABB Nera for presenting his experience with Alsys Ada.
For further information please contact:
Mr. Bengt Conradi Alsys AB Utsiktsvagen 10 Box2014 S-149 02 Nynashamn Sweden Tel: + 46 852 069 010 Fax: + 46 852 020 965
Reprinted with Permission of Alsys, Inc.
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Produced in cooperation with Ada Information Clearinghouse, Ada Software Alliance, and ACM SIGAda. Hard copy available from the Ada Information Clearinghouse, at the address below.
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The views, opinions, and findings contained in this report are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Agency position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other official documentation.
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