PLCSlib development tools

Help:- PLCSlib development tools

Introduction

The following software capabilities and tools are required in order to develop PLCSlib components:

XML editor

The source documentation for PLCSlib is specified using XML. Although XML can be developed using standard text editing tools, this approach is not recommended. The use of a validating XML editor is advisable to ensure the validity of the source XML files before they are committed to the source control system. The following tools have beed used in developing PLCSlib so far and are therefore recommended.

oXygen
Many others ...

SysML editor

The source specification of the Templates and some DEX components is SysML 1.2. It is hoped that eventually the SysML used within the PLCSlib environment will fully conform with the OMG canonical XMI specification allowing many different SysML tools to be used. However, at present the PLCSlib environment has been developed using the MagicDraw tool available from here.

OWL editor

The source specification for the reference data libraries is OWL/RDF XML. There is significant variation in the level of tool support for this specification. The following tools have been used successfully in developing PLCSlib and are therefore recommended:

Protege version 4.2 or higher

Build tool

Ant is a Java-based build tool. The Ant build file utils/build.xml is used for publishing PLCSlib to HTML. To use this build file, you need to have the following software installed:

Ant .
A recent version of the Java 2 Platform.
The SAXON XSLT processor.

NOTE To avoid memory problems, set the environment variable ANT_OPTS=-Xmx256m.

XSLT processor

The PLCSlib environment is dependent on the SAXON XSLT Processor. SAXON is provided as part of PLCSlib and is available at: lib/java/saxon/9.4.0.2HE/saxon9he.jar

NOTE Please use the version provided with PLCSlib as it has been tested with that version

NOTE The path to the installed saxon9he.jar file should be added to the Java CLASSPATH environment variable.

NOTE The environment variable SAXON_HOME should be set to the directory containing the saxon9he.jar file.

Ruby XMI processing

The PLCSlib environment is dependent on the Ruby scripting tool for XMI manipulation.

NOTE A number of tools could be used for XMI manipulation, however, Ruby was chosen because of it's cross platform support and excellent XML parsing capabilities and there is already a code base for SysML XMI as a result of a number of projects.

Ruby can be downloaded from the Ruby site

NOTE Version 19 or higher of Ruby is required.

Ruby libraries

Ruby can be extended using additional libraries, these are called Gems in the Ruby environment. The following Gems are required for the PLCSlib environment:

Nokogiri - A fast XML parser with XPath 2 support
UUID - A UUID/GUID generation support

To install these libraries enter the following command at the Ruby command line: gem install <libname>

Example:

gem install nokogiri
gem install uuid