XML formats used in ARCS

XML (eXtended Markup Language) is widely used in ARCS. The framework introduces several markup hierarchies to describe applications, state machines, composite components and library components.

Application descriptions are XML files that are used to detail the layout of applications and component communications. They are parsed by the arcsengine tool in order to execute them, that is to say load libraries and instanciate components at runtime. They are composed of the following markups:

• application (required, unique) with the optional attribute mode. It takes several values: base, event, thread, threadevent and gui;
  • context (required, unique) is the part describing libraries to load, components and constants;
  • processes (required, unique) decomposes an application inside a set of processes;
    • process (required) with the required attribute controller that should be the name of a component described as a statemachine;
      • sheet (required) with the required attribute id that tells the name of the sheet. A sheet corresponds to an operational configuration of the process.

The context and sheet markups are also enclosing hierarchies that are described below.

Library descriptions are enclosed inside a file. They are used with the tool arcslibmaker.