Build-System

libFAUDES C++ sources are largely POSIX compliant and have been verified to compile on various platforms, incl. Linux, Mac OsX and MS Windows, both 32-bit and 64-bit variants. Still, the build process is quite involved and requires certain additional tools. The download page therefore provides precompiled libFAUDES archives including executables of luafaudes and other relevant utilities.

For all other system environments you need to use the standard libFAUDES distribution and re-compile. The required steps are described below.

Application-Developer Targets

If you do not plan to extend libFAUDES itself, compilation within a POSIX compliant environment should be straight forward. The standard distribution ships with a configured source tree and provides a GNU-make Makefile that supports the following application developer targets.

After extracting the libFAUDES archive to e.g. ./libfaudes, open a shell (aka console, command line, etc) and run

> make clean
> make
> make tutorial
> make test

from within ./libfaudes to re-compile libFAUDES. On a multi-processor system, you may try

> make -j nn

where nn specifies the number of jobs to run in parallel. This has been tested only for the default target and is not expected to be functional for any other targets.

The provided Makefile makes use of GNU-make specific extensions, so you are best of using the GNU tool-chain. Most Linux Distributions offer the required tools by a C++ development package. For Mac OsX, the GNU tool-chain is provided for free by Apple's Developer Package or the Darwin project.

For MS Windows, libFAUDES has been verified to compile with Cygwin or MinGW. The former provides an almost POSIX environment and you can go ahead with the same instructions as for Linux/Unix. For MinGW you can use the supplied Makefile. However, you may need to specify the platform explicitly by e.g.

C:\libfaudes> make clean    FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_win
C:\libfaudes> make default  FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_win
C:\libfaudes> make tutorial FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_win

Note that the MinGW make, g++ and gcc must be specified in your PATH environment variable.

If you want to use MS Visual C++, the starting point is to grab the configured libFAUDES source and dump them into a Visual C++ project. When we last tested this, there was an issue with STL const_iterators, which was resolved by installing an SGI implementation of STL. Let us know if MS Visual C++ is crucial for your application.

Library-Developer Targets

When adding or removing libFAUDES plug-ins, the build-system needs to configure the source tree and generate UI and API documentation. In this stage, the current build-system relies on a number of more or less common Unix tools. For the following library developer targets we recommend a Unix-style environment:

Most Linux distributions come with both Perl and SWIG, the latter may require installation. Regarding SWIG, the particular version can be crucial (we have positive confirmation for v1.3.36, v1.3.40 and v2.0.1). The libFAUDES archive provides the SWIG sources used for libFAUDES development.

For libFAUDES development on a Windows system, we recommend to use the Cygwin environment. This has been tested with Cygwin version 1.7.9-1, choosing the devel package from the Cygwin installer. At the time of writing, Graphviz/dot was not available via Cygwin, however, a native Windows binary can be obtained directly from Graphviz

To re-configure and compile libFAUDES sources from scratch, you may run

> make dist-clean
> make configure
> make 
> make tutorial
> make test

When developing a plug-in, it is advisable to first edit the main Makefile to only enable those plug-ins, that are required in the development process. This will keep compilation times reasonably short. In particular, the luabindings depend on every single header file and the build process will recreate all luabindings from scratch when you edit any single header.

Reference Documentation Processing

While libFAUDES uses doxygen as a professional tool to generate the C++ API documentation, we did not yet find a similar tool for the user-reference. In order to still have some systematic approach to a user-level documentation, the libFAUDES build-system uses the run-time-interface as a basis. The compilation process invokes a number of home-grown tools which may need a re-design in due course. However, some care has been taken to have a consistent input format that encodes relevant structural data. In the meanwhile, we would like to encourage plug-in developers to (a) contribute to the user-reference to advertise the plug-in and (b) stick to the below conventions where ever possible to ease revisions of the build process.

RTI Definitions

A plug-in should provide one or more RTI definition files that define a URL and a list of keywords per user relevant faudes-function or faudes-type. The first keyword will be interpreted as section-name. Thus, the provided RTI definition files implicitly define the overall section structure of the user-reference. The section name typically matches the plug-in name. By convention, the URL consists of a filename and a location. The filename should start with the section name followed by an underscore. The location should match the respective function or type name.

Example, taken from cfl_definitions.rti

<FunctionDefinition name="CoreFaudes::LanguageConcatenate" [...] > 
<Documentation ref="corefaudes_regular.html#LanguageConcatenate"> 
Concatenates two languages.
</Documentation> 
<Keywords> 
CoreFaudes    "regular expressions"   generator     language      concatenate   
</Keywords> 
[...]
</FunctionDefinition> 

Documentation Source Files

A plug-in must provide documentation files corresponding to the URLs defined in the RTI definition files. As all libFAUDES documentation, the provided files have the extension *.fref and are processed by ref2html to generate plain XHTML output. The contents of an *.fref-file is expected to be well-formed XML with outer tag <ReferencePage> and otherwise using XHTML markup. More precisely, the outer tag <ReferencePage> corresponds to the <Body> tag from XHTML. For a selfcontained organization of the overall reference documentation, <ReferencePage> supports attributes to indicate chapter, section, page and title of the respective page. The following conventions apply:

Given all reference pages, the chapter, section and page-attributes implicitly define the overall documentation structure, used to automatically generate tables of contents and to provide consistent navigation. The title-attributes are cosemetic.

Example, taken from corefaudes_regular.fref

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE ReferencePage SYSTEM "http://www.faudes.org/dtd/1.0/referencepage.dtd">
<ReferencePage chapter="Reference" section="CoreFaudes" page="RegularExpressions" title="CoreFaudes - Regular Expressions">

<h1>
Functions related to Regular Expressions
</h1>

<p>
Regular expressions extend the <a href="corefaudes_langboolean.html">boolean algebra on languages</a> 
by the Kleene-closure and language concatenation operation. Additionally,  functions for the generating 
elements are provided, i.e. full- and alphabet language.
</p>

[... more HTML markup ... ]

</ReferencePage>

For convenience, the tool ref2html will recognise and substitute additional markup to support a consistent layout.

Note: A DTD file for the validation of documentation input files is provided. It is recommended to use an XML tool like xmllint or an XML editor in the process of editing documentation files.

Processing

To trigger a re-build of the user-reference, use

> make rti-clean
> make rti

This will

 

 

libFAUDES 2.23h --- 2014.04.03 --- with "synthesis-observer-observability-diagnosis-hiosys-iosystem-multitasking-coordinationcontrol-pushdown-timed-simulator-iodevice-luabindings"