StateWORKS Newsletter 1/08

Topics:

  1. Welcome
  2. New web site
  3. Changes to the StateWORKS Studio
  4. Changes to the RTDB
  5. Introduction of the VFSM library
  6. Products

1. Welcome

In my first newsletter in 2008 I would like to introduce to you our newly revised web site. We hope of course that it is better than the old version which has served us several years. Navigation around the new site is made much more obvious than before, and we also hope that our message will be easier to comprehend. We should very much appreciate your opinion. As we now also have a blog, it will be easier to communicate with us and with other visitors to our site.

In the past year, 2007, our specification tool StateWORKS Studio and the RTDB, which is the framework for StateWORKS runtime systems, have both received major improvements. They were discussed in several newsletters but I would like to make a short review today to show you the entire picture.

Regards
F. Wagner

2. New web site

The website www.stateworks.com has been restyled mainly to make it easier to navigate. The pulldown menus on top and the contextual sitemap on the left hand side should make it much easier to find the dozens of pages of information available on every aspect of StateWORKS. In the spirit of StateWORKS, the site is strict XHTML 1.1, which means that the slightest coding error will make a page unreadable… in StateWORKS we are allergic to coding errors!

The major novelty is the blog, this is actually a separate site www.stateworks.net seamlessly integrated visually and with respect to navigation. In the long run it is destined to replace the one-way communication we used to handle through the newsletter; a blog allows you, our readers, to react with comments and contribute to the development of StateWORKS and the StateWORKS community. We look forward to reading you!

3. Changes to the StateWORKS Studio

There were several improvements and changes made to StateWORKS Studio. The present version 7.1 incorporates all of them. Probably the most important one has been the introduction of the complement control value [4] and extension required for the VFSM library.

The accompanying simulation tools based on SWLab have been adapted to the password [1] in the RTDB. As the SWLab can be used only without a password these changes are irrelevant in the development environment; that is, for the users of StateWORKS Studio: when using monitors we just ignore the password entry in SWMon and SWQuickPro. Our new monitor SWQuickPro [2] combines SWQuick's ease of use and SWTerm command language and represents a powerful monitor for testing RTDB based applications. Therefore we eliminated the old tools SWQuick and SWTerm from the development package.

4. Changes to the RTDB

Most extensions have been implemented in the RTDB which is the heart of most StateWORKS run-time systems. The most important changes have been the introduction of a password to guard the tcp/ip access to the RTDB server [1] and adapting the executor to processing of complement control values [4].

The RTDB code has become platform independent being POSIX conformant and based on STL library. This makes the generation of a binary for certain operating systems and using several specific development tools easy.

StateWORKS operates in environments where part of the application control is realized in external devices. Therefore we have extended the StateWORKS allowing for specification and handling of external state machines [3] as if they were running in the RTDB.

Despite these significant changes and improvements you may read and further develop old projects with the new version 7.1 of the Studio and you may run old specifications using the new RTBB run-time systems. The other way round does not work: you cannot read projects prepared with the new version with the old StateWORKS Studio and you cannot run specifications generated with the new version of StateWORKS Studio on old RTDB based run-time systems.

5. Introduction of the VFSM library

We have extended our run-time system (application) package by a VFSM library [5]. The library is a subset of the RTDB library and contains the VFSM Executor. This has required also some extensions to the StateWORKS Studio.

The VFSM library is intended for use in simple projects with a few state machines which cannot, for some reason, employ the RTDB.

6. Products

Last but not least we have simplified our product range offering now a complete set consisting of the StateWORKS Studio and the application (run-time system) packages. The application packages contain both libraries: RTDB and VFSM at no extra cost. These software packages are available in BASIC and PRO versions: see details on our web site or send us a request for details.

References

  • [1] Technical Note: Password for StateWORKS run-time systems (RTDB), March 2007.
  • [2] Technical Note: Testing with StateWORKS, June 2007.
  • [3] Technical Note: Integrating external finite state machines into a StateWORKS System, August 2007.
  • [4] Technical Note: Complement Control Value in the VFSM concept, October 2007.
  • [5] Technical Note: Vfsm executor library, December 2007.