GNAT Library for Ada Distributed Environment (GLADE) and its PCS library (garlic)

This is release of the Ada 95 distributed systems annex for GNAT. New features are described in file NEWS.

• Introduction: Ada 95 & Distributed Systems.
• Installation, Documentation & Examples.
• What Does It Run on.
• Downloading GLADE.
• Commercial Support.
• Bug Reports & Technical Questions.
• Submitting Bug Fixes.
• GLADE History.
• Contributions.

Additional information can be found in files INSTALL and NEWS as well as in the 'Doc' directory.

Ada 95 is the first general-purpose language to provide a standard distributed programming paradigm. By combining the distributed and object-oriented features of Ada 95, it is possible to create an application where objects are physically distributed over a network of machines, without having to interface to any low-level communication layer. Likewise, by combining the distributed and real-time capabilities of Ada 95, it is possible to design applications which meet real-time constraints in a distributed environment.

GLADE is an implementation of the Distributed Systems Annex for the GNAT compiler. GLADE stands for GNAT Library for Ada Distributed Execution. It is an complete environment for developping distributed applications that includes:

• a complete PCS (Partition Communication System)
• a simple partition description language & tool
• utilities to build and start distributed applications

The caller and receiver stubs needed by the PCS are generated by the GNAT compiler using special flags. The partitioning tool is responsible for calling GNAT with the appropriate flags.

To see how to install the system please read file install_guide.md in Doc directory. Please look under the "Doc" directory for documentation on how to use GLADE and some more hints on installation possibilities. Directory "Examples" contains some examples on how to program a distributed application in Ada 95.

If you have a problem making your partitions connect with each other, please check that:

• You can use rsh from any machine involved in the distributed application to any other.

• Your /etc/hosts file (on Unix systems) does not associate your machine name with the 127.0.0.1 address; be aware that some systems come misconfigured by default.

This release is fully supported on:

• PC/Linux
• Windows NT

It may work on other platforms too.

We don't provide binary distribution for now.

Please fill an issue on github.

GLADE has been jointly developed by Ada Core Technologies and a research team from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST). The ENST team is composed of:

• Laurent Pautet ([email protected]),
• Samuel Tardieu ([email protected]).

GLADE filtering is part of a free contribution (04/97) from Prof. A. Strohmeier, T. Wolf and J. Kienzle (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland). Extra filters are available on:

  http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/filters.html

The basic principles behind this contribution for filtering is described in the following paper: J. Kienzle, Th. Wolf, A. Strohmeier: "Secure Communication in Distributed Ada", Proceedings of Ada-Europe '96, Montreux, Switzerland, June 1996, published as Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1088, pp. 198 - 210, Springer 1996.

GLADE replay features is part of a free contribution (04/97) from D. Neri, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden).