OpenModelica Development Environment with Eclipse Integration for Browsing, Modeling, and Debugging Adrian Pop, Peter Fritzson, Andreas Remar, Elmir Jagudin, David Akhvlediani PELAB – Programming Environment Lab, Dept. Computer Science Linköping University, S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden {adrpo, petfr}@ida.liu.se Abstract mental if it gives quick feedback, e.g. without recom- puting everything from scratch, and maintains a dia- The OpenModelica (MDT) Eclipse Plugin integrates logue with the user, including preserving the state of the OpenModelica compiler and debugger with the previous interactions with the user. Interactive envi- Eclipse Integrated Development Environment Frame- ronments are typically both more productive and more work.. MDT, together with the OpenModelica compiler fun to use. and debugger, provides an environment for Modelica There are many things that one wants a program- development projects. This includes browsing, code ming environment to do for the programmer, particu- completion through menus or popups, automatic inden- larly if it is interactive. What functionality should be tation even of syntactically incorrect models, and included? Comprehensive software development envi- model debugging. Simulation and plotting is also pos- ronments are expected to provide support for the major sible from a special command window. To our knowl- development phases, such as: edge, this is the first Eclipse plugin for an equation- • based language. Requirements analysis. • Design. • Implementation. 1 Introduction • Maintenance. The goal of our work with the Eclipse framework inte- A programming environment can be somewhat more gration in the OpenModelica modeling and develop- restrictive and need not necessarily support early ment environment is to achieve a more comprehensive phases such as requirements analysis, but it is an ad- and more powerful environment. It can be useful to vantage if such facilities are also included. The main first take a general look at this area including some point is to provide as much computer support as possi- background. ble for different aspects of software development, to free the developer from mundane tasks, so that more 1.1 Integrated Interactive Programming Envi- time and effort can be spent on the essential issues. The ronments following is a partial list of integrated programming An integrated interactive modeling and simulation en- environment facilities, some of which are already men- vironment is a special case of programming environ- tioned in (Sandewall 1978 [11]), that should be pro- ments with applications in modeling and simulation. vided for the programmer: Thus, it should fulfill the requirements both from gen- • Administration and configuration management of eral integrated environments and from the application program modules and classes, and different versions area of modeling and simulation mentioned in the pre- of these. vious section. • Administration and maintenance of test examples The main idea of an integrated programming envi- and their correct results. ronment in general is that a number of programming • Administration and maintenance of formal or in- support functions should be available within the same formal documentation of program parts, and auto- tool in a well-integrated way. This means that the func- matic generation of documentation from programs. tions should operate on the same data and program rep- • Support for a given programming methodology, e.g. resentations, exchange information when necessary, top-down or bottom-up. For example, if a top-down resulting in an environment that is both powerful and approach should be encouraged, it is natural for the easy to use. An environment is interactive and incre- interactive environment to maintain successive composition steps and mutual references between 1.3 Eclipse Platform Architecture those. By itself, Eclipse does not provide much end-user func- • Support for the interactive session. For example, tionality. The important contributions to Eclipse are previous interactions should be saved in an appro- based on its plugins. The smallest architectural unit of priate way so that the user can refer to previous the Eclipse platform is the plugin. commands or results, go back and edit those, and At the core of Eclipse is the Eclipse Platform Run- possibly re-execute. time. The Runtime in itself mostly provides the loading • Enhanced editing support, performed by an editor of external plugins. The Java Development Tooling that knows about the syntactic structure of the lan- (JDT) is for example a collection of plugins that are guage. It is an advantage if the system allows edit- loaded into Eclipse when they are requested. The fact ing of the program in different views. For example, that Eclipse is in itself written in Java and comes with editing of the overall system structure can be done the Java Development Tooling as default often leads in the graphical view, whereas editing of detailed newcomers to believe that Eclipse is a Java IDE with properties can be done in the textual view. plugin capabilities. It is in fact the other way around, • Cross-referencing and query facilities, to help the with Eclipse being just a base for plugins, and the Java user understand interdependences between parts of Development Tooling plugging into this base. large systems. To extend Eclipse, a set of new plugins must be cre- • Flexibility and extensibility, e.g. mechanisms to ex- ated. A plugin is created by extending a certain exten- tend the syntax and semantics of the programming sion point in Eclipse. There are several predefined ex- language representation and the functionality built tension points in Eclipse, and plugins can provide their into the environment. own extension points. This means that you can plug in • Accessible internal representation of programs. This plugins into other plugins. is often a prerequisite to the extensibility require- An extension point can have several plugins at- ment. An accessible internal representation means tached, and the plugin that will be used is determined that there is a well-defined representation of pro- by a property file. For example, the Modelica Editor is grams that are represented in data structures of the loaded at the same time as the Java Editor is loaded. programming language itself, so that user-written When a user opens a Java file, the Java Editor will be programs may inspect the structure and generate used, based on a property in the Java Editor extension. new programs. This property is also known as the In this case, it is the file name extension that selects principle of program-data equivalence. what editor should be used. Early work in interactive integrated programming envi- As the number of plugins in Eclipse can be very ronments supporting a specific language was done in large, a plugin is not actually loaded into memory be- the InterLisp system for the Lisp language: (Teitelman fore its contribution is directly requested by the user. 1974 [12]), common principles and experience of early This design makes the memory impact reasonably low interactive Lisp environments are described in (Sande- while running Eclipse. wall 1978 [11]), interactive and incremental Pascal A user-friendly aspect of Eclipse is the Eclipse Up- with the DICE system: (Fritzson 1983 [3]), the inte- date Manager which allows the user to install new grated Mjölner environment, (Lindskov, Knudsen, plugins just by pointing Eclipse to a certain website. Lehrmann-Madsen, and Magnusson 1993 [9]). This website is provided by the developers of the plugin that the user may wish to install. An update site 1.2 The Eclipse Framework at the OpenModelica [13] web site is for example pro- Eclipse [1] is an open source framework for creating vided for easy installation of the latest version of MDT. extensible integrated development environments 1.4 OpenModelica MDT Plugin into Eclipse (IDEs). (For the history of Eclipse, see Section 6). One of the goals of the Eclipse platform is to avoid duplicat- The MDT Eclipse plugin provides file and class hierar- ing common code that is needed to implement a power- chy browsing and text editing capabilities. Syntax high- ful integrated environment for development of soft- lighting facilities and a compilation manager are also ware. By allowing third parties to easily extend the included in MDT, as well as integration of the debug- platform via the plugin concept, the amount of new ger for the algorithmic Modelica code. code that needs to be written is decreased. OpenModelica is structured as several communicat- ing processes in client-server architecture, primarily exchanging information through a Corba interface, see Figure 3. The OpenModelica compiler/interpreter (OMC) is the server, communicating with clients. The Eclipse MDT plugin is one of the clients. Parse Client: Graphic Model Editor Server: Main Program Corba Including Compiler, Interpreter, etc. Client: OMShell Interactive Session Handler SCode Interactive Client: Eclipse Untyped API Plugin Inst Typed Checked Command API system plot Ceval etc. Figure 3. The client-server architecture of the OpenModelica environment. Messages from the Corba interface are of two kinds. The first group consists of expressions or user com- mands which are evaluated by the Ceval module. The Figure 1. The architecture of Eclipse, with possible plugin second group includes declarations of classes, vari- positions marked. ables, etc., assignments, and client-server API calls that are handled via the Interactive module,