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e-clips january - system modeling, uml, gui's, and more... |
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Embedded systems keep getting more and more complex - with more complicated hardware, more software, and more 'engineering teams' working together to bring these products to market quickly and under budget. Graphical user interfaces (GUI's) now define many products and thus need to be defined themselves. This month's eLetter discusses the latest developments for building better software.
contents:
- system modeling: the chicken or the egg?
- gui's: adding a 'graphical user interface' to your product
- conference calendar: upcoming events
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SDL Forum: Share Your Software Modeling Experience
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The 13th System Design Languages Forum addresses issues related to the modeling and analysis of reactive and real-time systems in order to anticipate and influence the future trends. The forum focuses on Design for Dependable Systems. Click for more info!
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system modeling: the chicken or the egg?
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Which should come first: the 'product' or the 'model' of the product? Obviously it would be better if we modeled our products first so as to avoid bugs, crashes, defects, etc., but in the real world many embedded products are still defined on 'pencil and paper,' or other crude methodologies. True testing comes only with real hardware - and this is costly, dangerous, and slow, often precluding multi-person development teams, hardware/software codevelopment, and effective product pre-verification.
UML and other Object-oriented methodologies seek to allow the pre-design of products as 'systems' in software. But, heretofore, UML modeling tools have been expensive with steep learning curves. See, for example, VDC's new UML Study,
UML Design Tools Market Continues to Face Competitive Pressure from Low-Priced Alternatives.
Seeking a way out of this conundrum, Telelogic kicked off the new year with a major announcement: a new, free UML design environment - Telelogic Modeler™. The product enables users to specify, visualize, and document system and software designs, including the system’s structure and intended behavior, greatly improving team workflow and collaboration. At the push of a button, users can create a document comprising the entirety of their design’s model elements, eliminating the time-consuming and error-prone task of documenting designs. (Release here).
It is a great introduction to UML methodology as well as a gateway to more sophisticaed paid products from Telelogic. (For a chart of what you get in each version, click here. For the free download,
here.)
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gui's: adding a 'graphical user interface' to your product
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Even if you can't fully model your product beforehand, new tools allow you to add (and pre-model) the graphical user interface or gui. Command-line, or headless systems, are more and more things of the past - today's consumers, militaries, and industrial users often demand sophisticated user interfaces even if devices are cost- and resource-constrained.
Mentor Graphics thus pushed into graphical user interface design with their December, 2006, 'Inflexion Platform UI' announcement. Working in tandem with the company's Nucleus OS Mobile RTOS, the idea is to leverage XML to make GUI designs (called 'themes') quick and easy to develop on the PC. New 'themes' can be constructed easily, without programming or scripting, using simple declarative XML. Release here, product information, here.
Similarly, Saelig Company announced EmPresent™, a smart GUI toolkit. It provides a Win32-desktop-based simulation environment for developers to visualize and test applications even when the hardware is not ready. EmPresent™ generates platform-specific C code for a wide range of microcontrollers, giving developers the ability to design the application once and then port it to several different target devices. Release here
And in November, Altia announced DeepScreen 5.0, a graphics code generator that converts prototype GUIs built on a development host into deployable C or Java code that runs on an embedded target. DeepScreen 5.0’s enhanced support for alpha blending enables the use of high-end graphics editing tools, such as Photoshop, as a method to build eye-popping GUIs. Release here.
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conference calendar: upcoming events |
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