An Open Platform Project for Embedded Multicore Systems

Hi Zakir,

I only tried to import the file in order to test backwards compatiblity. As mentioned before, we want to generate amalthea models (or rather parts of the info contained in them) for a third party. In principle that is not very hard. In practice it seems that the amalthea model format is a moving target. So the questions is, which version of the format shall we support. We don't want to constantly update the model emitter on our side. Also, supporting the latest version may make the info useless for other users who are still on an older version.

These are strategic questions, and if you want long term support for your file format you should really think about them, especially if you want to become some sort of standard.

- Do the amalthea developers intend/guarantee to provide backward compatiblity for the amalthea model format? Or will you only provide converters on demand?

- Also, is there a clear specification for the current format or is it "documented by the code that reads/emits the file"?

- Does the file format even contain a file version identifier (so that you can detect which file format version you are dealing with)?

From our point of view, it would be the best option if amalthea would transparently support old file versions (i.e. old files are upgraded silently and internally) so that we can simply support the file version currently required by the third party and don't need to worry about all that.

Thx,
Alex

Hello Alex,

I answered your questions below ...

alexh wrote:
I recommend to use the newest version AMALTHEA Release 1.1.1. It has new model elements that were not available in the previous versions.

alexh wrote:
We already spent effort to implement a framework for model migration and currently we are implementing the single migration steps:
1.0.3 -> 1.1.0 -> 1.1.1 -> APP4MC 0.7.0

So the answer is YES. We intend to provide converters to update step by step to the newest version. Our users already have large models and they definitely demand this feature.

alexh wrote:
We provide the XSD files for the model and beginning with AMALTHEA 1.1.1 we made the format as explicit as possible. For example: default values are now serialized.

alexh wrote:
The XML namespace of every submodel contains the version number,
e.g. "www.amalthea.itea2.org/model/1.2.0/...".

In the available releases the version numbers of the release and the model differ

• AMALTHEA Release 1.0.3 --- Model version 1.1.0
• AMALTHEA Release 1.1.0 --- Model version 1.2.0
• AMALTHEA Release 1.1.1 --- Model version 1.3.0

but in the following releases as an Eclipse project we will align the numbers.

Regards,
Harald

Hi Harald,
final question:

How often do you release new versions (approximately) and do you expect/plan the file format to stabelize soon or will it keep changing a lot with every release?

Thx,
Alex

Sorry, I missed your last question.

We plan to have 2-3 releases per year (approximately), aligned with the Eclipse releases.

I assume that the basic mechanisms like references will be stable, but the model will evolve.

Regards,
Harald