[kepler-dev] composite actor library

[Chad Berkley]

Hey Ilkay and Wibke,

Several of us are seeing errors with various things that seem to all be 
stemming from either work you are doing on the composite actors or work 
i'm doing on the moml parser.  It seems that the work you are doing does 
not work with the CVS version of PTII.  The work i'm doing doesn't work 
with the release version of PTII (because they've changed the api for 
the moml parser).  But even when we run kepler with the release version 
of PTII, dan, jing and I are seeing an error whenever we try to drag a 
composite from the library to the canvas that informs us that a port 
cannot be link to a relation inside a composite.  Have you seen this 
error?

When I try to run your stuff with the cvs version, I see a bunch of 
errors that says some of your code is using the wrong constructor format 
for creating ports:

Caused by: ptolemy.kernel.util.IllegalActionException: Could not find a 
port named 'result' or 'resultPort'. This can occur when the name of the 
variable does not match the name passed to the constructor of the actor.
      [java] Right:
      [java]     result = new TypedIOPort(this, "result", true, false);
      [java] Right:
      [java]     result = new TypedIOPort(this, "resultPort", true, false);
      [java] Wrong:
      [java]     result = new TypedIOPort(this, "foo", true, false);
      [java]   in .configuration.actor library.String Concatenator
      [java]     at ptolemy.kernel.Entity.clone(Entity.java:199)
      [java]     ... 52 more

Could you take a look and try to see if the error is easily fixable?  I 
think there will be some serious implications of writing code that 
depends on the 4.0 api instead of the newest api.  We had major problems 
the last time that ptolemy went from 3 to 4, so I'm trying to develop to 
their newest API whenever possible.  If you see a problem with the 
approach of developing to the CVS version of ptolemy, let me know.

chad