Appendix C - The online gateways

The asn2aadlPlus tool of the Data Modeling toolchain was developed on two paths, almost from the start.

The first one was the "traditional" one, where the end user has to install the toolchain in his working machine (Windows/Linux), install the necessary support software, and proceed with the invocations.

It became immediately apparent, however, that there was another alternative, which would significantly ease the process: offering the same functionality over Web gateways, where the only thing required was a Web browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, etc). In this manner, the end users simply accessed our appropriately setup page, and were able to perform the translations of their ASN.1 grammars to both AADL [10] and UML [4] definitions.

From the main site (http://www.semantix.gr/assert/), the end user navigated to the Downloads section, and from there, two links offered direct access to:

• The ASN.1 to AADL gateway, which translated the ASN.1 definitions into DATA definitions suitable for use from within LabASSERT (as described in 2.1).
• The ASN.1 to UML gateway, which translated the ASN.1 definitions into RCM definitions suitable for use from within Eclipse (as described in 2.1).

The following screenshots show a characteristic usage of the gateways:

Figure 10.1: Accessing the gateways

Figure 10.2: Submitting an ASN.1 grammar

Figure 10.3: Obtaining a result