Java's Great, But We Still Love Ada Too!

Aonix proudly has been in the Ada business for over a quarter century, since the original founding of Alsys by Ada's creator, the late Jean Ichbiah. Alsys later merged with another Ada giant, Telesoft, and also absorbed German Ada supplier SysTeam. Through the years, we have been Ada pioneers - the first to provide an off-the-shelf safety certifiable solution, the first to provide an affordable, fast, and user-friendly desktop Ada solution (ObjectAda for Windows), the first Ada supplier to support the Eclipse environment, and the first commercial adopter of the lightning fast compilation technology created by Ada 95 designer Tucker Taft.

Many of our more visible marketing activities these days focus on our emerging real-time Java technologies: PERC Ultra and PERC Pico. We're aware that this visibility sometimes  can be a cause for consternation among our Ada clientele.  I've enjoyed discussions recently with some prominent Ada advocates such as Dirk Craeynest, the co-founder of Ada-Belgium and vice president of Ada-Europe. Dirk eloquently points out that our claims for Java's abilities in real-time and embedded development are equally applicable for Ada, and have long been proven by Ada's impressive string of industry success stories.

Of course, Dirk is correct, but I'd like to take the opportunity to set the record straight about Aonix' views of Ada and Java.

First, it is important to understand that Aonix remains a successful and committed player in the Ada business. The Aonix product roadmap for 2007 includes no less than nine product releases. Core engineering activities currently underway include enhanced support for multi-partition kernels, Ada 2005 features, and the continuation of our best of breed Eclipse integration which we are now contributing to the open source community for the benefit of everyone, including users of GNAT. Aonix will continue to provide Ada technology and support as long as the market provides customers to consume it.

At the same time, Aonix is not an "Ada company" in the sense of being focused on Ada only,  and we have not been one since the days of Ichbiah. In the early days of Ada, most of the Ada suppliers were companies focused only on Ada. But the mark of a healthy and growing company is that it offers multiple complementary product lines aimed with a clear market focus. In that spirit, Aonix offers multiple product lines today. In addition to Ada products, we offer technologies in real-time Java, the TeleUSE line of Motif UIMS products, and the StP line of modeling tools. Our focus and specialization is in supplying tools and services for rigorous, mission-critical applications development. All of our products fit under that umbrella.

It is fair for some outside observers to wonder why we may sometimes seem to spend more visible energy promoting Java than Ada or our other products. To understand the reasons, one has to consider the current state of the markets for these products.

Ada is not a new technology. It has been in existence for close to a quarter century. It is well understood, with a deeply entrenched user base. We see the market for Ada as stable and healthy. There exists a large body of developers who, like us, believe that Ada is an elegant and powerful language supported by great products. Without a doubt, it is worthy of use, or at least fair consideration, on every major mission critical application.

By contrast, Java (at least in the embedded space, and especially in the real-time space) is a newcomer. Its value is very well understood by the enormous community of Java users, but it's applicability to our target audience is not as well understood by the market. Like Ada, Java has been shown to provide tremendous productivity, quality, and reliability advantages over C and C++. Further, our PERC technology has paved the way to show that Java not only is suitable, but indeed advantageous in the realm of complex real-time and embedded systems. We know that PERC is great, but the only way to communicate its value to our target audience is through visible marketing efforts. The target market already knows about the Ada value proposition.

Although significant advertising attention is paid to Java for the reasons cited above, I have to point out that we conduct substantial and continuous marketing of Ada as well. Marketing is far more than advertising. For one thing, we select trade shows that are attractive to both Ada and Java developers. Our newsletters always present both Ada and Java news. We do about half of our press releases on Ada topics.  At public events we give Ada and Java equal treatment in our graphics and materials. Further, our R&D team is exactly evenly split between Ada and Java activities.

Truthfully, our Ada and Java solutions share a similar story: safe, predictable, reliable, scalable, modular, error-resistant, and highly productive tools. We won't bother to argue which language is better - we prefer to let the customer make that judgment. Our job is to inform our customers about our offerings, not to be language evangelists. Evangelism is best left to independent voices.

My message is this: Java is not the enemy of Ada. I think it can be agreed that C/C++ is the common enemy of everyone interested in sustainable growth in software complexity. C/C++ does for software what oxidation does for raw iron: makes it unsuitable for complex, reliable, and long-lived applications. We believe the industry wins every time a design choice is made for Ada or Java rather than C/C++, and that's what we're all about.

Email us at: editor@aonixnews.com.