FESA Graph Editor

<!--HTML-->The Front-End Software Architecture (FESA) framework, is a comprehensive environment developed at CERN, for equipment-specialists to design, develop, test and deploy real-time control software for front-end computers. Based on an XML-design-document that is being validated against a FESA XML-schema to enforce all FESA-design-constraints, the framework can automatically generate C++ source code of which the developer only needs to implement some well-defined methods. Depending on the equipment and measuring system, an XML-design-document can grow in complexity making the overview of the SW from difficult to impossible. In addition, editing the XML document directly or by using the FESA’s design tool (eclipse’s plugin), can become cumbersome due to the intricacy of the framework. It is therefore essential to provide an interactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) where the FESA-design is represented graphically with blocks grouping the XML tags; and arrows depicting the logical linkage among them. This talk describes this GUI (FESA Graph Editor) and how it adds in the design and documentation process of a FESA-design-document.