Ada reusable software components for teaching distributed systems

This paper presents our experience in developing a toolset for distributed applications in Ada in an educational environment. Our students are trained to become top level engineers in the telecommunications domain. Their curriculum is quite broad and computer science is only one subject among others. We are aware that most of them will consider a computer as an ordinary tool. Moreover, their education is twofold: on the one hand, they must be taught the foundations in order to deal with complex situations, on the other hand, they must train and develop their practical skills. We believe software components to be an interesting solution for these students as they can use them as building blocks to produce complex systems and these components emphasize software engineering benefits.