The Top Level Project consists of a large amount of common infrastructure
in the areas of user interface, EMF based data models, data collection
and communications control, as well as remote execution environments.
All of these subsystems are included in the Hyades Platform.
The Platform provides these common subsystems as well as all the extension
points for leveraging or extending them in solution specific tooling or
runtime. This includes Eclipse workbench plug-ins as well as runtime plug-ins
on a target and optionally remote system.
Following is a very brief description of the subsystems. For more details
on these subsystems, please refer to the project website.
User Interface
User interfaces are provided to manage and access resources used by
the Test and Performance Top Level Project. The interfaces also provide
the basic user metaphors desired for interacting with remote systems
and the resources involved in order to have consistent end user experiences.
A basic navigator and many extension points are provided as well as
user preferences and facilities to preserve session user state. Along
with the basic navigation and extension points, several controls, viewers
and editors are also provided in order to give access to all the resources
and make common behavior easier.
EMF models
Data models are intended to be a key integration point in the project
and are provided in 5 basic areas.
- Trace for the collection of local or distributed execution stacks
as well as heap information.
- Definition models for the creation and management of test cases
as well as behavioral models for tests, and/or related activities.
- Test execution histories for the collection of test executions over
time.
- Generic statistical model for the capturing of arbitrary numerical
data over time.
- Log model that can hold associated Common Base Events or any logged
message that can be transformed into a Common Base Event.
All these models can be cross-linked and made persistent using XMI
or in some cases a relational database back is optionally used.
Data Collection
An infrastructure is provided to collect data for the various models.
This includes the XML fragment specifications that need to be created
as well as the model loaders that will load those fragments into the
specific model. Where meaningful, service function is provided to assist
in creating the instances of these fragments. For example, a correlation
service is provided to assist in creating data that can be correlated
across machine boundaries. A set of classes to create Common Base Event
instances is also provided.
Communication
Although the actual communication layer can be replaced via plug-in,
a default TCP/IP based infrastructure is provided that has an optional
security plug-in. Wrapped around the actual communication layer is a
generic interface to facilitate the movement of commands and data between
the workbench and one or more agents. The agents reside in the system
being monitored and shared memory pipes are provided to the common communications
infrastructure.
There is also a full management system for agents. This includes registration
so they can be shared across process and transaction boundaries on a
given machine. The data communication and control interfaces are being
exposed with C, Java, and Web services bindings.
Execution Environment
A method for controlling an execution environment for a system under
test is often needed. From the basics of attaching, starting, and stopping
a remote process as well as providing a predefined link to the communication
layer is provided in this subsystem of the platform.
A generic runtime that can be driven by a process description is also
provided. The initial intent is to use this environment as a generic
test behavior implementation that can be used to drive any public interface,
especially a web service binding.
