Update of SmartSoft communication patterns

Dear all,

The SmartSoft communication framework is being extended continuously. We
are integrating more and more components of the FAW software into the
open source branch and therefore made the following slight changes to
further improve usage:

- please note that SmartSoft now is called "orocos-smartsoft" in our
cvs-repository (due to the new directory structure) !!!

- slightly changed the directory structure
    - added another layer in the directory tree to support better
separation of components
        - src/smartSoftKernel
                contains the smartsoft core with all the examples
        - src/interfaceClasses
                contains all public communication objects which might be
of interest to other components.
                Communication objects found here can be used for
interface contracts between components
                and will be extended very soon (pose class, laserscan
class etc.)
        - src/components
                arbitrary components using SmartSoft, still empty ...
        - src/utility
                contains all kinds of utilities which proved to be
useful but which do not necessarily depend on SmartSoft

- should now also compile with gcc 3.2

- Added Visualization Tools of Boris Kluge

- Added Streams-Classes of Boris Kluge

- Added Property management of Pablo d'Angelo


Regards

Christian Schlegel, Boris Kluge, Pablo d'Angelo


=======================================================================================

The Visualization Tools by Boris Kluge:

What's in there?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
o A Qt drawing widget.
  There are three ways of having things drawn onto the widget.
  Firstly, this widget delegates drawing of its contents to clients
according
  to the observer design pattern. See the model_changed() slot and the
  redraw(FawPainter&) signal.
  Secondly, you may register an object or a container of objects that
provide
  a PaintMethod (see fawPainter.hh and fawDrawingWidget.hh) with the
widget.
  Finally, there is rudimentary support for a scene graph.
  The contents of the widget may be zoomed and scrolled by pressing ctrl

  by pressing the left or right button and moving the mouse.

o A class hierarchy of painters.
  The abstract base class FawPainter defines the interface for drawing
  operations that are implemented by three derived classes.
  The FawDrawingWidgetPainter is used for drawing onto a DrawingWidget.
  Use the FawFigPainter to export your drawings to xfig or various other

  graphics file formats (i.e., to those supported by fig2dev). The
  FawDrawingStoreReplayPainter may be used to buffer and replay drawing
  operations. It can be converted to/from streams/strings and is
suitable
  for remote drawing.


What can you do with that?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
o You can do metric offline drawing, as shown in the example
  fawVisualizationTest.

o You can easily export your drawing to graphics file formats.


=======================================================================================

The Streams-Classes by Boris Kluge:

The utility package "fawStreams" provides iostreams, streambufs and
dynamic buffers for on-the-fly compression and dynamic storage of
data. It will be used to communicate visualization data (see
fawDrawingStoreReplayPainter in the fawVisualization package) for
online visualization of components.



=======================================================================================

The Property-Package by Pablo d'Angelo :

interfaceClasses/property:
    communication objects used to send / receive properties

utility/property:
    general property classes including a simple parser for xml formatted
property files
    (the xml parser is the reason why we changed to ACE 5.3 / TAO 1.3)

utility/propertySmartSoft:
    PropertyServerHandler:
        supports simple import / export of properties via SmartSoft

 Parameter2Property:
    helper function to forward SmartSoft parameters from *.ini-files to
the property tree

 ComponentWithProperties:
    example component to show usage of properties

PropertyClient:
      example component, receives and modifies the properties of the
above component

--

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Christian Schlegel
FAW Ulm (Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing)
PO Box 2060
D-89010 Ulm
Germany

Tel. : ++49 (731) 501 8949
Fax  : ++49 (731) 501 999
email: [email protected]
WWW  : http://www.faw.uni-ulm.de/
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