A ToolBus Application

As example we have an application consisting of two tools. Tool1 can either send a 'message' to Tool2 and then waits for an acknowledgement from Tool2, or it can send a 'quit' after which the application will shutdown.

Architecture Specification

We show an animation of the architecture here, where Component1 has just sent a message to Component2, which is ready to send an acknowledgement back.

We refine the architecture specification into a specification of a ToolBus application.

Component1 =
        send-message .
        snd(c1 >> c2, message) .
        rec(c2 >> c1, ack) .
        Component1
    +   stop .
        snd-quit

Take the process Component1 from the architecture of our toy example.
We can make a vertical implementation by applying the following mapping.

send-message            ->  tb-rec-event(T1, tbterm(message))
snd(c1 >> c2, message)  ->  tb-snd-msg(t1, t2, tbterm(message))
rec(c2 >> c1, ack)      ->  tb-rec-msg(t2, t1, tbterm(ack)) .
                            tb-snd-ack-event(T1, tbterm(message))
stop                    ->  tb-rec-event(T1, tbterm(quit))
snd-quit                ->  snd-tb-shutdown

PT1 =
        tb-rec-event(T1, tbterm(message)) .
        tb-snd-msg(t1, t2, tbterm(message)) .
        tb-rec-msg(t2, t1, tbterm(ack)) .
        tb-snd-ack-event(T1, tbterm(message)) .
        PT1
    +   tb-rec-event(T1, tbterm(quit)) .
        snd-tb-shutdown

And renaming Component1 into PT1 gives the following result.

In a similar way an implementation (PT2) for Component2 can be obtained.

PTool1 = Tool1Adapter || PT1
PTool2 = Tool2 || PT2

We now make a horizontal implementations for PT1 and PT2 by constraining them with Tool1Adapter, the specification of Tool1 with a separate adapter, and Tool2, the specification of Tool2 with a built-in adapter.
Note that Tool1Adapter is itself a constraining of AdapterTool1 with Tool1.

ToolBus Application Specification

We show an animation, where AdapterTool1 has just sent a message it had received from Tool1 to ToolBus process PT1.

We can make an implementation consisting of three Tcl/Tk programs (Tool1, its adapter, and Tool2), and a ToolBus script. The ToolBus script is derived from the specification of the ToolBus processes in the specification of the example as ToolBus application.

ToolBus Script

We show a screendump of this application at work together with the viewer of the ToolBus.