Rapide Tutorial
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Language Trail
Example Trail
Sw Development Trail
Tools Introduction
Syntax Reference Manual
Introduction
This tutorial of the Rapide environment is structured in three trails with
frequent cross links between them and some supporting modules. The
language trail will take you through a description
of the different elements of the language and how they fit together.
In the example trail you will be able to learn
by example how to write a Rapide model of your system. In the Sw
development trail, you will learn how to apply Rapide to the different
phases of software development. As support, a section
describing what tools are available for development in Rapide as well as
a detailed evolutionary example describing possible usage of the tools
is presented. Also, a section with
the syntax constructs and their meaning is included.
This tutorial draws heavily on existing documentation of the Rapide
language and system. It aims to provide a structured guide through
it rather than replace it.
The links to the trails will be marked with
for the language trail,
for the example trail,
for the Sw development trail and finally
for the syntax reference manual.
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Architecture Construction drescribes
the concept of architecture and how Rapide approaches its description.
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Conventional programming elements: Types,
Procedural Language. Rapide has as one of its subcomponents a conventional
procedural language that can be used to implement architecture modules.
This section is a description of this procedural language and the underlying
type system that supports it.
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Event Model and posets: The central
part of Rapide is the way it represents computations as Partially Ordered
Sets of EvenTs. Understanding this section is crucial to understanding
the computational model which is the foundation of Rapide.
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Structure of the process language:
Events are generated by processes in Rapide, Processes are the unit of
sequential execution and also the means of achieving parallelism.
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Reactive Statements: Rules. Rapide offers
a rule based approach to describe behavior. Rules are pieces of code that
execute when certain preconditions are matched. The execution of a rule
may result in some events being generated, or due to the type structure
of Rapide where modules, interfaces and connections are valid working types,
rules may affect the connection topology of an architecture, making an
architecture behave as a complete set of more "static" architectures.
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Patterns: The left hand side of rules
are patterns to be matched. Given that the atomic execution component of
a Rapide system is the event, patterns are defined over the set of events
an architecture can generate.
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Advanced Topics: Rapide allows its
own structural components like interfaces, connections and architectures
themselves to be "first class" citizens of its type system. This means
that architectures, modules and connections can be created and manipulated
at runtime thus opening the door to expressing "families
of behaviors" or "families of architectures".
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Generators: These are the factories
where these structural elements can be created in a Rapide system.
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Usage of patterns in Architecture
Descriptions: Patterns also allow very complex connection schemes to
be described and expressed very succinctly.
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Maps and Constraints: Finally,
Rapide allows some meta-information about architectures to be expressed as
equivalence MAPS between architectures, that allow to asses whether two
systems/architectures will behave in the same way, and therefore facilitates
the description of "reference architectures" for a whole range of systems.
Constraints in Rapide are asserted onto the topology of events a
particular system should produce, thereby allowing for "non-prescriptive"
specifications of systems, but rather a requirements based specification
of them.
The purpose of this trail is to guide the reader through a variety of uses
of Rapide, from a simple architecture where the main concepts of Rapide
are shown to the usage of sophisticated specification tools like constraints
and maps.
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Architectures, Actions and processes:
Five dinning philosophers are used to illustrate the basic building blocks
of Rapide and how they fit together in a specification that is executable.
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Connections and interfaces:
A simple application/resource architecture is used to walk you through
the construction of architectures using the Rapide tool set.
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Architecture Refinement:
Rapide offers a variety of concepts to support system design at
several levels of detail. This example shows how to define a
subarchitecture that implements the resource interface declared in the
previous example.
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Parametric Architectures and
Pattern Matching: One of the most powerful features of Rapide is
its ability to describe parametric architectures; architectures where
the components and connections are determined at runtime from program
parameters. In this example, the application/resource architecture is
extended to handle an arbitrary number of resources that are specified
by a parameter in the architecture.
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Constraints and Maps:
Rapide offers the possibility of defining a "reference" system by the
events it can and cannot generate, and then use this definition as
a checkable constraint on other system architectures. This example
shows how to use the Rapide tools to define a reference architecture,
express constraints on that reference architecture, how to interpret
another system as if it were an instance of the reference, and check
it for conformance with the reference architecture.
Rapide is a language designed to support the development of large
distributed and concurrent systems. This trail shows how Rapide can
be used in different phases of the life cycle of a system. Rapide is
mainly oriented towards the design and validation of systems, rather
than towards the implementation phases. Accordingly, this trail is
concerned with system
top level design and analysis,
design and rapid prototyping and
test generation and execution
This section of the tutorial is a reference manual for Rapide language
syntax, where specific format of statements is given, the covered topics
are: