The Sage-ST ^TM Development System (SDS) was developed at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), which is a government-owned, contractor-operated facility managed by the Department of Energy Idaho Field Office (DOE-ID). The primary mission of the INL is to furnish engineering services and products, principally for defense, nuclear energy, and associated technologies.

The SDS is a utility designed to facilitate rapid and professional construction of computer applications using Ada. Ada is a state-of-the-art programming language that provides a good environment for large and small software development projects. The concept of breaking large programs into manageable, task-specific packages allows simultaneous development by a group of programmers. The language is strongly typed, which has been shown to increase programmer productivity and software portability, and greatly reduce software maintenance costs. A product created using the Ada language and the Sage-ST ^TM system will be tailored to the user's requirements, will have capabilities not found in other commercially available systems, and will be developed in far less time with greater accuracy than other programmer-developed applications.

Sage-ST ^TM began in the early 1980's as a product named SAGE written in FORTRAN on the CDC Cyber computers at the INL. The original goal was to provide database access facilities and a friendly interface for scientific, engineering, and analysis systems developed at the laboratory. Four years later, SAGE was ported to the IBM PC microcomputer environment, first in Pascal and then in the Modula-2 language, still supporting various applications for the DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In 1987, the United States Marine Corp (USMC) requested the INL to provide a prototype of the Marine Corp Combat Readiness Evaluation System (MCCRES) in Alsys Ada using the SAGE development tool. In response to that request, SAGE was once again converted to another language and became Sage-ST ^TM . Sage-ST ^TM is available, license free, to government, academia, and private industry. Beginning with the initial version of SAGE and now into the Sage-ST ^TM era, the libraries and source code have been made available to anyone wishing to make use of the technology through the standard DOE software distribution channel shown below:

Sage-ST ^TM includes over 240,000 lines of Ada code and has been estimated by code metric analyzer programs to represent more than 173 person years of development effort, with an average cyclomatic complexity of 4 as measured by a standard Ada code metric analysis tool. It offers efficient and versatile relational database tools, formatted screens and menus, computed graphics used for display and analysis, communications, online helps, and sorting to name a few. Each of these capabilities has been designed to be an integral part of the Sage-ST ^TM developed application. Each has been designed to be efficiently implemented and offer state-of-the-art technology. As an application is designed and developed, the desired capabilities are chosen and included along with any requirements unique to that application.

For additional information on any aspect of Sage-ST ^TM , or for technical assistance for Users' Group members, please contact:

SUBTOPICS