[kepler-dev] Adding a new director and actors to kepler/director and kepler/actors

[Aaron Schultz]

Hi Christopher, sorry for the late response

Because the java code for the Continuous actor and director is already 
in the ptolemy module you are best off by just adding the xml and 
manifest files to the actors and directors modules.  Since the ptolemy 
module is shipped with Kepler, the default set of actors is defined by 
the kars generated from the xml files in the actors and directors 
modules and all of their java code exists in the shipped set of modules.

You can think of modules as a vessel for compiled java code and 
associated resources, whereas KARs are a convenient way to pass around 
their metadata outside of the module system (via email, webpage, etc.) 
as smaller packets and communicate to the receiver which modules are 
necessary to run them.  The inclusion of kars inside of modules is just 
a convenient way for us to store them in version control and to directly 
distribute default actors along with the module.  The concept of a 
module containing only KAR files is a bit redundant.  You can do it but 
a better method may be to either put those kar files directly in the 
module where their java code is contained or to upload the kar files to 
a website somewhere.  In the case where you want to distribute many 
actors together, they can all go into one KAR file.

Cheers,
Aaron




Christopher Brooks wrote:
> Ok, thanks to Aaron's hints below, I was able to set up the LSIDs
> appropriately.  I updated
>
> https://kepler-project.org/developers/reference/updating-the-kepler-directors-and-actors 
>
> and
> https://kepler-project.org/developers/teams/framework/kepler-life-science-identifiers-keplerlsid 
>
>
> I created a separate "continuous" module that contains the kar .xml
> descriptions for the Continuous domain actors.  I added the
> ContinuousDirector itself to the list of other directors.
>
> I'm thinking we should delete CTDirector from the list of directors
> that are made available by default in Kepler.  ContinuousDirector
> is under active development, CTDirector is not.  Users could still
> instantiate CTDirector by hand if they so desired.  Comments?
>
> Another question:  I put the Continuous actors in a separate module.
> Was this the right thing to do, or should I just put them in with
> the Actors?  One issues is that these actors probably will
> only work under the ContinuousDirector.  I don't think they will
> work well under SDF.  I created a separate module because the
> actors module is rather large and I think we talked about breaking
> it up.
>
> If we want to have the continuous actor kar xml files in a separate
> module, then should the default kepler build require the continuous
> module?
>
> The continuous module contains only the kar .xml files, so it is only
> a few 10s of kbytes in size.
>
> If we want Kepler to always have the continuous actors directly 
> available,
> then how is this done?  Should I just add continuous to
> kepler/module-info/modules.txt?
>
>
> One side issue about my current continuous module is that when I do
>   ant change-to -Dsuite=continuous
>   ant run
> Then the left hand tree view looks like:
> + Components
> + Projects
> + Statistics
> + Actors
> + Continuous
> + Directors
> + R
>
> I'd like Continuous to not be at the top level.  Any ideas?
>
> This is all for bug 4194: Kepler should have the Continous and Modal 
> domains
> http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4194
>
> I'd like to finish this up by Friday.
>
> I updated docs about how to add a Director to the list of directors.
> I also created ptII/doc/adm/docml2karxml which reads in Ptolemy DocML
> files from ptII/doc/codeDoc and tries to generate a KAR .xml file
>
> Sample use might be:
>
>    cd kepler/ptolemy
>    export PTII=`pwd`
>    ./configure
>    make >& make.out
>    cd $PTII/doc; make docs
>    cd ~/src/kepler/actors/resources/kar
>    $PTII/adm/bin/docml2karxml 
> $PTII/doc/codeDoc/ptolemy/domains/continuous/lib/*.xml
>
> _Christopher
>
>