The Alba Technology Demonstrator

The Source Code

Like Allegra, Alba is written using literate programming development methods. For those unfamiliar with this technique, or who have not used Norm Walsh's DocBook/XML-based LitProg LP system with Ada, we have created a small "Hello, world" example to illustrate the process.

Alba is also a demonstration of LP techniques, on a larger scale. She also illustrates the tasking structure that will be used for Allegra, but without any excess code that's not related to the demo itself. Think of Alba as a "skeleton" version of Allegra.

Alba is distributed in two forms:

• The official source-code package. This includes the DocBook-XML LitProg sources that are used to generate the Ada source and the HTML documentation. These are the files we modify when we update the program or its docs. Requires an XSLT processor and Walsh's LitProg tools.
• The "easy" source-code package. This includes the pre-tangled Ada source code, and the pre-woven HTML document, for those who are not quite ready to dive into the whole LP thing. Even if you get this package, we encourage you to think of it as only a starting point, and to move to the official LP sources when you can.

In addition, we also offer a slightly modified re-packaging of LitProg, which is what we actually use for developing Alba and Allegra. We want to note that these are not Walsh's originals; get those from the DocBook repository on SourceForge here.

The Program Documentation

To give you an idea of what this LP stuff is all about, here's the Alba document, as produced by the LP "weave" process. It is also included as part of the "easy" package listed above, and can be generated from the sources in the "official" package.