You have your shiny new DSL up and running thanks to the Eclipse Modeling Technologies and you built a powerful tooling with graphical modelers, textual syntaxes or dedicated editors to support it. But how can you see what is going on when a model is executed ? Don't you need to simulate your design in some way ? Wouldn't you want to see your editors being animated directly within your modeling environment based on execution traces or simulator results?
The GEMOC Research Project designed a methodology to bring animation and execution analysis to DSLs. The companion technologies required to put this in action are small dedicated components (all open-source) at a "proof of concept" maturity level extending proven components : Sirius, Eclipse Debug, Xtend making such features within the reach of Eclipse based tooling. The general intent regarding those OSS technologies is to leverage them within different contexts and contribute them to Eclipse once proven strong enough. The method covers a large spectrum of use cases from DSLs with a straightforward execution semantic to a combination of different DSLs with concurrent execution semantic. Any tool provider can leverage both the technologies and the method to provide an executable DSL and animated graphical modelers to its users enabling simulation and debugging at an early phase of the design.
This talk presents the approach, the technologies and demonstrate it through an example: providing Eclipse Debug integration and diagram animation capabilities for Arduino Designer (EPL) : setting breakpoints, stepping forward or backward in the execution, inspecting the variables states... We will walk you through the steps required to develop such features, the choices to make and the trade-offs involved. Expects live demos with simulated blinking leds and a virtual cat robot !
6. Analysis of Behavioral Models
● Early V&V of behavioral properties
● Software engineering, systems engineering, enterprise architecture, scientific
modeling...
19. Model Debugging
● Traversing step forward the states reached by the model through the application
of the interpreter
● Intuitive model comprehension technique
○ No abstraction gap
○ Better turn-arounds
→ Fast convergence towards an acceptable design
20. How To Get Your Own (Domain-Specific)
Debugger ?
21. Gemoc ANR project
“A Language Workbench for concurrent
execution and simulation of
heterogeneous models”
http://gemoc.org/ins
56. Leverage the animation framework
● Encapsulate step over/into/return in transactions
● Bridge the Eclipse Debug APIs and the EMF APIs
57. Leverage the animation framework
● Encapsulate step over/into/return in transactions
● Bridge the Eclipse Debug APIs and the EMF APIs
● Transmit events and requests
58. Leverage the animation framework
● Encapsulate step over/into/return in transactions
● Bridge the Eclipse Debug APIs and the EMF APIs
● Transmit events and requests
● Initialize the tooling extension
59. Leverage the animation framework
● Encapsulate step over/into/return in transactions
● Bridge the Eclipse Debug APIs and the EMF APIs
● Transmit events and requests
● Initialize the tooling extension
● Provide off-the-shelf ecore model for runtime data
70. Leverage the simulation framework
● Use Xtend/Kermeta to define the interpreter
● A generic execution engine
● A generic control panel and timeline
84. Leverage the Model Debugging
● Relies on an execution trace to revert the executed model into a prior state
● Forward/backward navigation into the execution trace
○ No record & replay
○ (similar) Replay
85. Supporting Efficient and Advanced Omniscient Debugging for xDSMLs
(Erwan Bousse, Jonathan Corley, Benoit Combemale, Jeff Gray, Benoit Baudry)
In 8th International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2015), ACM, 2015.
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01182517
88. In a nutshell
1. Leverage Animation Framework (POJO simulator)
○ Code the interpreter
○ Code the execution engine
→ Quick results, easy to integrate, minimum execution control
89. In a nutshell
1. Leverage Animation Framework (POJO simulator)
○ Code the interpreter
○ Code the execution engine
→ Quick results, easy to integrate, minimum execution control
2. Leverage Simulation Framework (Advanced simulator)
○ Code the interpreter
○ Use the generic execution engine
→ More analysis capabilities and rich execution control (timeline...)
90. In a nutshell
1. Leverage Animation Framework (POJO simulator)
○ Code the interpreter
○ Code the execution engine
→ Quick results, easy to integrate, minimum execution control
2. Leverage Simulation Framework (Advanced simulator)
○ Code the interpreter
○ Use the generic execution engine
→ More analysis capabilities and rich execution control (timeline...)
3. Leverage Model Debugging
○ Use the trace manager
→ Advanced trace management facilities
92. To be continued
● Try executable Arduino Designer v0.1.x
● Read the GEMOC Publications
● Join the GEMOC Initiative
● Get in touch with us to breathe life into your designer