SmartSide Adopts Ada and GNAT Pro for Smart Devices Platform

“In our relentless search for quality and performance, Ada has come up as the most efficient technology for writing reliable, secure and scalable code that is also easily maintainable,” said David Dhénaux, SmartSide CTO. “GNAT Pro is our framework of choice for writing Ada code. Its all-in-one development environment allows us to handle activities ranging from initial development to static analysis and testing. It reduces our time-to-market and gives us the edge we need in today’s competitive environment. We also selected AdaCore for the high quality and responsiveness of its support team. Finally, we chose to work with AdaCore because their product roadmap is particularly well-suited to ours, with tools and language evolution focused on reliability.”

The system consists of two primary components:


-The generic core, which acts as the intelligence of the system and performs the major work (data collection, processing, analysis). This part of the system is sufficiently generic and configurable to process all kinds of energy and environmental data.
-The user interfaces, which are separate from the core, are very flexible and easy to adapt. They are easily configurable to reflect specific business needs.

The infrastructure of the Smart Devices platform is designed to be scalable, reliable and fault resistant. GNAT Pro and the Ada programming language were chosen because of their long and successful track record in the aerospace and defense industries, where high levels of reliability are critical. SmartSide thoroughly evaluated several other languages, but none matched the reliabilty and data-handling qualities of Ada.

“SmartSide’s diligence in searching for an appropriate programming language led them to Ada, which is especially pleasing,” said Jamie Ayre, Marketing Director of AdaCore Europe. “Ada has made a name for itself as a language for programming reliable, safe and secure systems. With the advent of Ada 2012 and the new features it introduces, it has become the benchmark for the development of these systems.”