Questions about the Scribble tools

[simongay]

The ABCD group in Glasgow have started trying the Scribble tools. I have a couple of questions based on this example:

module TwoBuyerGlobal;

type <java> "java.lang.String" from "rt.jar" as String;

type <java> "java.lang.Integer" from "rt.jar" as Int;

global protocol ProtocolName(role Buyer1, role Buyer2, role Seller) {

  book(String) from Buyer1 to Seller;

  book(Int) from Seller to Buyer1;

  quote(Int) from Buyer1 to Buyer2;

  choice at Buyer2 {

  agree() from Buyer2 to Buyer1, Seller;

  transfer(Int) from Buyer1 to Seller;

  transfer(Int) from Buyer2 to Seller;

  }

  or {

  quit() from Buyer2 to Buyer1, Seller;

  }

}

The first thing is that the command line projection tool reports errors here, because the agree() and quit() messages have no content. However, the Eclipse tool doesn't report an error, but when asked to project it does nothing (with no message).

The second thing is that it seems to be necessary to define the types String and Int by importing from somewhere; the code above uses "rt.jar" as an arbitrary filename copied from another example somewhere; I'm sure it doesn't exist in my path. So where should I import type definitions from, and at what point does it become important that the specified file exists?

Thanks very much if you can comment, Gary.

Regards,

Simon Gay

[objectiser]

Hi Simon

Glad to hear that your team are using the tools.

Sounds like this is a bug - so if you could report it in the issue tracking system (jira): https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SCRIBBLE.

At the moment only the logic name is used - however at some point we may need further information about the types, for example if assertions are used that access message content (both to validate the assertions and also use them during monitoring). So at the moment the content of those fields is not important.

Regards

Gary

[objectiser]

Forgot to say - I'm planning on doing another release in the next couple of weeks, so hopefully any bugs you find and report can be addressed before then

[simongay]

Thanks, Gary - I have created a bug report (I hope I did it correctly).

Simon

[objectiser]

Yes, got it thanks. For anyone else interested, the jira is here: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SCRIBBLE-164

Also I've added a reference to this forum thread, to provide an example. However in future it would be great if you could add the example, and what steps are required to reproduce the issue, in the jira. Don't worry this time, as the information is in this forum thread.

Thanks again.

[objectiser]

Hi Simon

Hopefully you have received notifications that the bug was fixed, and the message about the 0.3.0.Final now being available.

Let me know if you have any further problems.

Thanks.

Regards

Gary

[simongay]

Yes, thanks very much, Gary. We will try the new version.

Another thing that has come up is a discrepancy between the Scribble grammar in the specification document, and the tools.

The grammar for send (Scribble Language Reference Version 0.2) requires a single destination role, but the tools allow a list of roles.

I don't know whether this is a question for you or not; maybe the role list allowed in the tool is interpreted as an abbreviation for a sequence of individual messages to separate roles; maybe this is described somewhere in the tool documentation.

Simon

[objectiser]

Hi Simon

This is one of the changes in the 0.3 version of the spec - I'll need to check with Ray about whether that spec version is ok to put on the website.

Regards

Gary