DALipse

DALipse is a graphical software development environment to visually specify DAL applications and their interactions. DALipse has been developed as an Eclipse plugin so that it can run on a large variety of platforms. Right now, DALipse supports the design of applications, their interactions as a finite state machine, and the platform along with the ability to optimize their mappings, to functionally test the system, and to generate code towards a one of the supported target platforms.

Installation

Next, it is explained how to install and upgrade DALipse.

Prerequisites and Requirements

DALipse has been developed for Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo, http://www.eclipse.org/) (Helios) and Java 1.7 (http://jdk7.java.net/). Except for functionally testing your system, no other prerequisites and tools are required.

In order to test your applications in the functional simulator, more tools are required. In particular, make, a g++ compiler, and a linker must be installed on the host system. If your host system is Windows, you may install the Cygwin environment (http://www.cygwin.com/). Once Cygwin is installed, you have to extend Window's PATH variable to include the Cygwin library. This can be done as follows:

• Go to the Control Panel — System — Advanced — Environmental Variables.

• From here find the PATH variable and click on it to edit it.

• At the end of the line add a semi-colon followed immediately by the path to your Cygwin installation's bin folder. In case you have a typical installation of Cygwin, which uses the default path, you should add at the end of your PATH variable:

  ;C:\cygwin\bin\

• Hit ok and then apply.

Install DALipse

Once you have installed all required tools, you can install DALipse:

• In Eclipse, go to Help — Install New Software…

• From here, click on Add….

• In the windows Add Repository, add:

  • Name: DALipse

  • Location: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~euretile/dalipse

• Hit ok and select the newly added repository in the dropdown list.

• Select Distributed Application Layer (DAL), click on Next, and follow the instructions to complete the installation.

  You might receive a security warning that you are installing software that contains unsigned content. Just hit ok and continue.

• After DALipse is successfully installed, Eclipse asks you to restart. Do so in order to fully use DALipse.

Upgrade DALipse

Eclipse does not provide any automatic updating mechanism, but you can easily update DALipse to a new version. To do so, you have to do the following steps:

• In Eclipse, go to Help — Check for Updates.
• Select either all software components to update or just the Distributed Application Layer (DAL).
• Click on Next and follow the instructions to complete the update process.

Create a new DAL Project

Once that DALipse is installed, you can use it to create your own DAL applications. Either you can start with an empty project or you can use an example project.

Create an Empty Project

In order to create an empty DAL project, you have to proceed as follows:

• Go to File — New — Other… and select DAL — DAL Project. Then click on Next.
• Enter a project name, location, and select an architecture. Then, click on Finish.
• Eclipse will automatically open the finite state machine file.

Start with an Example

There are five example DAL projects included in DALipse. In order to open one of these projects, you have to proceed as follows:

• Go to File — New — Examples and select DAL Examples — DAL Example $x$ . Then click on Next.
• Then click on Finish and Eclipse will open the finite state machine file.

Launching DAL

DALipse comes with the ability to execute a DAL project in the DAL tool chain. To start the DAL tool chain, you have to proceed as follows:

• Click right on the DAL project that you want to launch. Then select Run As — DAL Application.
• In case that your generator is not "functional simulation", EXPO is started and you can start with the mapping optimization.
• Afterwards, code synthesis is executed and depending on your settings, your code is compiled and executed.

As already mentioned, in case your generator is not 'functional simulation', the DAL tool chain automatically executes the mapping optimization. However, this requires that you have defined a problem specification file for your project. All examples are provided with the specification file, but you might have to create your own problem specification file for a new project.

If you want to modify the launching settings as, for example, changing the generator or activating the automatical code complication and execution, you can do so by following these steps:

• Go to Run — Run Configurations.
• In the newly opened window, select on the left side DAL — [name of your project].
• Then you can change on the right side the properties of the launcher.
• After applying the changes, you can start the launcher by clicking on Run.

Mapping Optimization

The integrated mapping optimization tool of the DAL tool chain is based on the work described in. After you have started the DAL tool chain, it automatically starts EXPO and a separate optimization window is opened for each Maximal Extended Connected State Group (MECSG). To calculate the Pareto front, you have to proceed as follows:

• Go to the population tab and click on plot population.
• Then you can go back to the control tab and start the optimization by clicking Run/Pause. After the cluster-level optimization stage, a new window is opened for the intra-cluster-level optimization.
• In order to select a specific mapping, click right on this mapping point and select write to XML.
• Finally, close EXPO to continue with the DAL tool chain.