Distribution in Ada

Question

I'm searching for some good books/tutorials/guides on how to develop distributed applications using Ada.

I already have some books on Ada programming, but all of them don't talk about distribution or they only mention it very briefly.

The ideal thing would be a book/guide that focus on the practical side of things (implementation) but any resource, either free or commercial, is appreciated.

Answer 1

The "Burns & Welling" book covers concurrency in depth, but doesn't have as much to say about distributed systems as I would expect. Nevertheless it is probably essential reading if you're going to be doing a lot of this stuff.

I'm still reading Professor McCormick's book "Building Parallel, Real-time and embedded Applications with Ada" and it does an excellent job of getting a reader started with a wide range of application-oriented aspects of Ada - sadly missing in other books which focus o the base language - and that includes both the DSA (pure Ada) and PolyOrb (for mixed languages) approaches to distributed systems, including very readable code examples.

Start with this latter book (IMO). (and its lead author has been seen around these parts, so this is a good place to ask questions! :-)

Answer 2

Section 8 in the "PolyORB User's Guide" is a small tutorial on how to develop a distributed application in Ada using the Distributed Systems Annex (DSA).

The "PolyORB User's Guide" also contains examples of developing distributed applications using other constructs than the DSA, which might be of interest, but using the DSA is likely to give you the most elegant application if all the components primarily are in Ada.