Introduction

I do not only do long haul flights to far-away countries. i also do day trips to destinations that are a bit closer.
This time I had to be in Geneva (also called Genève or Genf depending on your language..) There is a direct flight from Schiphol airport. An early one to Geneva and a late one back. So I booked and, for a change, I travelled light.

The Trip

It felt funny all day to hardly have luggage… I looked up multiple time in panic from the feeling something was missing… human habits… strange thing.
But it was a long day. I woke up at 5 to be in the 5:45 train to Schiphol. I always hear people complaining about trains being late and not arriving at all. I have to say that I never had trouble with that… Its the planes that give me trouble.. or the airports.. or the airline..

Being up that early had one advantage. The papers and the internet were taking since days about an event that was coming up: “The Superbloodwolfmoon” or something like that… The disadvantage was that you had to get up early to see it… and I was. It looked very nice, the picture was not as cool as I wanted but hey, it’s not a camera, it’s a phone!

So I was on Schiphol on time, without the need to check-in luggage I just walked on to the lounge. In exactly 2 hours from my own chair to the lounge chair. Not bad.
Flight went well, I picked up my rental car and picked up the collegues that were also there to drive to the customer.
It was a short visit, convincing the customer was not difficult, i gave a quick demo of Rhapsody using the RXF (in C++) and the fantastic Target Debugger. That mostly impresses the s…t out of new customers, certainly if they have been using Rhapsody before.
So we were back in time at the airport, we could even drink a quick cup of coffee. Then the flight back was leaving. After arrival I took the train back and was at home at 23:15. A long day indeed.

Training

I am asked a lot about what people need to do to learn more about Rhapsody. Well that is very easy. Try to visit relevant congresses like the ESE in Germany, also the Embedded World where the famous Bruce Powel Douglass gives lectures about MBSE. Also our MESCONF, the Rhapsody User Group Meetings and the IBM IoT meetings are very recommended to visit, you will learn a lot about Rhapsody and have the opportunity to speak with lots of other Rhapsody users.

Also highly recommended are trainings. The basic training (Yes, even if you already have experience with Rhapsody but have acquired your knowledge by learning it by yourself: a training will improve your knowledge! (I did that myself. After 6 months Rhapsody and creating adapters I visited a Training given my Martin Stockl. I thought, well let’s visit that maybe I learned something new… I can tell you I have never learned so much as during that training….

We also have advanced trainings, about different subjects. Also we have partners, like Frank Braun from Evocean that give very interesting Trainings like the standard C++ Raspberry Pi Training and soon the Framework Training (9/10 April in Munich. That will boost your Rhapsody knowledge! (Is in the German language) You can apply directly on our website.

That was it! Happy modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Introduction

Sorry, hardly time to write these days. We are having long days to use the week as effectively as possible. And then there is the time difference… If I am finally done working the US is just waking up and full of energy looking at projects.. My home city is preparing for dinner… But lets not complain. I will write more about India later, first I want to write something about the (near) future!

Embedded World

We are back at the Embedded World!! Yes finally. Not as big as before, we dont see the point in having a huge booth anymore, a small one will do as well. We cooperate as before but now with OOSE (and with Sodius, of course)!
The Embedded World will be in the “Messe Nürnberg” from Februari 26-28. We are in Hall 4, Booth 4-150. We have Coffee….;-)

The motto will be:

EEE

(Engineering Efficiency Empowerment by seamles integration of Process, Methods and Tools)

The ability to collaborate across disciplines is the key success factor in product development. In today’s engineering processes we see a multitude of heterogeneous systems, which should fulfill the demand for integrated systems. We use requirements management tools, ALM / CLM / PLM solutions, modeling tools, department-specific tools, quality analyzers, just to name a few. All equipped with interfaces for integration or collaboration with other tools. Nevertheless, it is always a challenge to pass data loss-free from one discipline to the next. It is even more difficult when data is to be exchanged across company boundaries. Because often only a filtered subset of data is exchanged, or different standards or tool versions are maintained.

Willert, oose and Sodius cooperate with the objective to support you in the optimization of your processes and engineering methods and to ensure a valid data flow between the departments. Willert contributes its expertise in embedded and systems engineering. oose contributes its expertise in process and method consulting. And with SECollab, Sodius offers a tool for visualizing and processing engineering data from a wide variety of tools and disciplines.

Our Offer

On our booth on the Embedded World in Nürnberg we offer you a free, 30 minutes analysis and evaluation session of your current situation at our stand and give suggestions for improvement directly.

Use the expertise of Andreas Willert and Tim Weilkiens at our booth Hall 4 – 150 on 26. – 28.02. in Nuremberg. A maximum of 8 slots are available per day. If you want to be sure of getting a slot, make an appointment before the fair with Mrs. Willert: swillert@willert.de (Tell her I sent you…)

Of course I will be there to answer Rhapsody questions live!

We will gladly send you an admission voucher for the fair. (Sorry, the pictures are in german, they should be understandable. When I have the source I will translate them)

1st step: rough process definition

2nd step: Precise definition of the work steps

Our lectures in the forum at Embedded World (Hall 2 – Booth 510)

Efficiency in engineering through seamlessly integrated processes and tools

Andreas Willert and Tim Weilkiens in German – 26.02. / 11.30 – 28.02. / 11.00 clock

A consistent environment reduces the obstacles on the way of developing artifacts from idea to product. Organizational, methodical and technical process breaks require more effort and at the same time lead to information losses and increased risk. We will show you how to develop benefit-oriented process steps and how to derive and implement the necessary seamless integration of tools.

Modeling the “Standards” Way

Walter van der Heiden in English – 27.02. / 10:00

In various standards we can observe common themes of abstraction, specialization, refinement and relationship (traceability). Aligning the value of these standards and easing the adoption is the most effective way to improve and realize success in an organization. We have applied a SysML for Systems Engineering, AUTOSAR for Vehicle Design and Software Architecture, and UML for Software Design and Implementation. Using high quality UML tools and simply targeted bridges, engineers can focus on their designs and models for developing their solutions. We want to demonstrate SysML models that transition to AUTOSAR designs, that are moved to implementation designs (in UML or Simulink), and finally code generation. All the while maintaining simple bidirectional traceability and design artifacts demanded by ASPICE.

That’s it, Happy Modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Introduction

Sorry, hardly time to write these days. We are having long days to use the week as effectively as possible. And then there is the time difference… If I am finally done working the US is just waking up and full of energy looking at projects.. My home city is preparing for dinner… But lets not complain. I will write more about India later, first I want to write something about the (near) future!

Embedded World

We are back at the Embedded World!! Yes finally. Not as big as before, we dont see the point in having a huge booth anymore, a small one will do as well. We cooperate as before but now with OOSE (and with Sodius, of course)!
The Embedded World will be in the “Messe Nürnberg” from Februari 26-28. We are in Hall 4, Booth 4-150. We have Coffee….;-)

The motto will be:

EEE

(Engineering Efficiency Empowerment by seamles integration of Process, Methods and Tools)

The ability to collaborate across disciplines is the key success factor in product development. In today’s engineering processes we see a multitude of heterogeneous systems, which should fulfill the demand for integrated systems. We use requirements management tools, ALM / CLM / PLM solutions, modeling tools, department-specific tools, quality analyzers, just to name a few. All equipped with interfaces for integration or collaboration with other tools. Nevertheless, it is always a challenge to pass data loss-free from one discipline to the next. It is even more difficult when data is to be exchanged across company boundaries. Because often only a filtered subset of data is exchanged, or different standards or tool versions are maintained.

Willert, oose and Sodius cooperate with the objective to support you in the optimization of your processes and engineering methods and to ensure a valid data flow between the departments. Willert contributes its expertise in embedded and systems engineering. oose contributes its expertise in process and method consulting. And with SECollab, Sodius offers a tool for visualizing and processing engineering data from a wide variety of tools and disciplines.

Our Offer

On our booth on the Embedded World in Nürnberg we offer you a free, 30 minutes analysis and evaluation session of your current situation at our stand and give suggestions for improvement directly.

Use the expertise of Andreas Willert and Tim Weilkiens at our booth Hall 4 – 150 on 26. – 28.02. in Nuremberg. A maximum of 8 slots are available per day. If you want to be sure of getting a slot, make an appointment before the fair with Mrs. Willert: swillert@willert.de (Tell her I sent you…)

Of course I will be there to answer Rhapsody questions live!

We will gladly send you an admission voucher for the fair. (Sorry, the pictures are in german, they should be understandable. When I have the source I will translate them)

1st step: rough process definition

2nd step: Precise definition of the work steps

Our lectures in the forum at Embedded World (Hall 2 – Booth 510)

Efficiency in engineering through seamlessly integrated processes and tools

Andreas Willert and Tim Weilkiens in German – 26.02. / 11.30 – 28.02. / 11.00 clock

A consistent environment reduces the obstacles on the way of developing artifacts from idea to product. Organizational, methodical and technical process breaks require more effort and at the same time lead to information losses and increased risk. We will show you how to develop benefit-oriented process steps and how to derive and implement the necessary seamless integration of tools.

Modeling the “Standards” Way

Walter van der Heiden in English – 27.02. / 10:00

In various standards we can observe common themes of abstraction, specialization, refinement and relationship (traceability). Aligning the value of these standards and easing the adoption is the most effective way to improve and realize success in an organization. We have applied a SysML for Systems Engineering, AUTOSAR for Vehicle Design and Software Architecture, and UML for Software Design and Implementation. Using high quality UML tools and simply targeted bridges, engineers can focus on their designs and models for developing their solutions. We want to demonstrate SysML models that transition to AUTOSAR designs, that are moved to implementation designs (in UML or Simulink), and finally code generation. All the while maintaining simple bidirectional traceability and design artifacts demanded by ASPICE.

That’s it, Happy Modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Introduction

I have been to Bochum before but I normally don’t use Rhapsody in Java… So still a “first”. I can program Java, however! Not as good as C but I’ll manage.

And I have to say… I like RiJ! It is really, really easy to use. Rhapsody brings its own Java so there is no need to install anything! Itjust works.

It’s a long time ago that I gave a training where all students had their “Hello World” running in minutes.

The Framework is, of course, much simpler, Java already brings everything you need to run UML generated code.

The only thing the Framework needs to do is to proces the events and the timers.

Issues

There were not many issues with getting stuff to work. The most important thing was an issue when you installed Rhapsody and selected the wrong java Directory. But this is easy to repair.
in your Rhapsody Share directory there is an “etc” directory. In that directory you will find two batch files: jdkmake.bat and jdkrun.bat. These files have paths in them that need to point to the JDK that Rhapsody delivers by standard.

Hello World Example

The first program you make in any new language is “Hello world”. So we will creata a Java Hello world.
Open Rhapsody in Java and create a new project. Call it “HelloWorld” and create it in a directory where you can find it back. (Rhapsody wants to create projects in the Rhapsody data directory by default.
When the project is created you will see an empty Object Model Diagram. Draw a Class (either select the Class from the drawing menu or right click in the diagram and select “Class”. Then draw the class. Cal it “Hello” and give it a constructor, do not give it parameters.
In the constructor write ( in the Tab “Implementation” ) the following:

System.out.println”Hello World”);

Apply the change. Then we need an Object, right click on the Class “Hello” in the Rhapsody Model Browser and select “Make an Object”.
Then press “GMR” (Generate Make Run) and presto: it works!

Happy Modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter vand er Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Introduction

First of all: All a Happy New Year! OK, OK… the year is already 2 weeks old… Dorry… not much time to write earlier. Anyways… please let 2019 be a year full of modeling. There will be lots of exciting things this year, new versions of tools, new versions of standards and, as usual, a lot of work. Unfortunately there will also be a lot of old stuff this year where we are still fighting with. Let me take you on a trip to memory lane.

Paths

It is 2019…. and still we are fighting with path- and filenames containing spaces and slash and or backslash.
I cannot prove what my assumption is, but I think I’m not far off the truth.

The first DOS (MS-DOS) Version did not contain directories. It was all a flat file system where there was room for a maximum of 128 files in the “root”. Since there were only floppy-disks with 360kB disk space this was not a big problem.

In the same time (Start of the 1980’s) there were other systems, one of them was CP/M. They already had directories, although very primitive. You had 26 directories (You can guess…. ‘A’-‘Z’…)

You already had UNIX at that time which was far more advanced then MS-DOS or CP/M, that had real directories. The Bell Lab guys had thought of that. You could type in paths with a ‘/’ (slash) as separator character.

I think that Bill Gates and his staff just stole the concept from Unix without really understanding the true meaning and working (As they would repeat many many times after that) and exchanged the ‘/’ with ‘\’. So no-one would notice that it was stolen (duh…) and not grasping the concept of the ‘\’ (escape character)

Spaces

Since the MS-DOS file system was an early version of FAT, the filenames were limited to 8.3, 8 characters for the filenames, 3 for the extension. Many versions later Microsoft introduced the concept of long filenames. They were “hacked” into the file system, there was a flag indicating that there was a long filename. The short filename was built up from the long name, removing characters and adding a ‘~’. So we jokingly said that the name of the company should have been changed to “Micros~1”

Nowadays most modern tools can handle decent filenames up to 256 characters and long paths. But Windows would not be Windows if it did not have a couple of unpleasant surprises. For compatibility, a lot of old (partly ancient) API calls are still part of Windows and will still work. So some older tools have “side-effects” that show up when you least expect it.

What does this have to do with Rhapsody? Well.. also Rhapsody is sometimes (indirectly) influenced by old Microsoft behavior. If you want to create a path while creating a new project you will notice that Rhapsody cannot create a directory for you directly in the root of your drive… The error message is cryptic ( “No rights to write” or something similar ) so it takes a while to figure that out. Is basically the problem with using the old (but still present) Windows API calls.

Other issues

Further, Rhapsody is mostly not the only tool involved in the development, (certainly not for Willert Customers, I will make sure they use code generation! ) mostly there are other tools. Often called via command line. And this is where the “Microsoft Moments” come up. (A Microsoft Moment: the moment you realize the world can be saved by destroying Redmond WA)
Because the command line has issues, depending on what version. We have searched and searched for inexplicable errors multiple times just to find out that on one machine Windows would not accept the “/” in a path or a space.
Let me not shout too much at Microsoft. The days of “If Microsoft ever makes something that doesn’t suck it will be a vacuum cleaner ” are behind us. Their hardware has actually always been good. And they improved a lot lately. This opposed to Apple who are definitely loosing it with every new OS version.

2019

The first weeks have been quite but 2019 already promises a lot of trips for your traveling modeler. I will be blogging! Happy modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Yes, I know, it is originally called Groundhog Day and not GroundHague Day.
And it is officially the 2nd of February and not October 31, I know.
But I had the feeling I was reliving the same day over and over again in The Hague and that reminded of one of my favorite movies.

A couple of years ago I had something similar when I needed a Visa for India. On the first Day I went there it turned out I had not enough information. So I had to return the next day (with the same information) and then after a few hours wait I got my badly needed Visa. Just in Time, the next day was my flight…

This time I needed a China Visa. At the beginning of this year I also needed an India Visa but India had now finally reached the 21st century and switched to eVisa. So the internet and a credit card payment sufficed.

Not so for China. I could send in all information by mail but that would mean I would have to send my passport as well. That would mean I would be without passport for more than 2 weeks. That is not an option with my normal travel schedule. I found out, however, that I can have a second passport just for this reason. Good for next time.

Since I have to be there not only for the 11th AUTOSAR Open Conference but also for the MESCONF, my German colleagues offered to take care of the Visa. But that turned out to be impossible. I am still Dutch and I still live I the Netherlands.

So I used the Public Holiday in Germany to go to the China Visa Office in The Hague. By train, I am not going to drive in my country, takes ages, no parking place and a lot of stress.
The Visa Office was not, as I assumed, in the Chinese Embassy, but there is a (commercial!) office that controls the visa process. The real visa is, of course, issued by the embassy, but the process around it is handled by a third party.

It went a lot quicker than the India one, a short 5 minute wait and it was my turn. So confidence increased. Unfortunately the papers I brought were not sufficient. For Germany they were but not for the Netherlands. They did not accept any document that was not in either Chinese or English (so not the German documents I had) and they needed more documentation from China.
Now another tiny problem was that China was also already closed (They are 7 hours ahead of us) so no chance to getting the needed documents
(I needed an official document from the Commerce Chamber of China that the company I was visiting really existed….) …
So…return the next day, Phil…

The next day I had all info covered. I woke up at 4 to have more time with China, I had already mailed the list I needed the night before, received everything I needed, printed it all together with a new application form and I now hoped it was OK. So back to The Hague with the train.
And… it was, they accepted the application and I received a paper that I needed to collect my passport 6 days later…. Now that was not an option (I had to fly 2 days later)
Luckily they had an emergency procedure. But China does not work fast, they need a full day (And that is the urgent where they left you bleed for, financially that is, €200 ,-)
So… return the next day, Phil…

So the next day I went to The Hague again, now it took only 10 minutes but than I had my passport back with a fresh China Visa. The groundhog did not see his shadow and the winter was over… back home and the time can continue.

Is there any Rhapsody news? Yes there is!!! We have a new promotion movie. Called “single source of Truth”, it is very very nice.

Managing complexity, managing resources, achieving goals: Successful projects in embedded systems / software engineering need powerful, coordinated procedures, tools and competencies. The single source of truth principle is an important element in the context of model-driven engineering.

You can find it on:

Willert Website, YouTube, Vimeo

So… that’s it. Blogging in China is not easy. The Chinese government does not like google, WhatsApp, YouTube and a lot of other sites where we normally work with. So don’t be mad if you don’t see much of me next weeks.

Happy Modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

I’ve been to Nantes a couple of times. I really like it there. It is a great city, quite large but with a very nice old town. This time I was not alone, the whole company joined me.

We are closely cooperating with Sodius. They are located mainly in Nantes and we wanted to give all colleagues a chance to learn to know each other.

So all the German and US colleagues flew over to have a weekend of getting to know each other better.

The French really made an effort to show the best of their city, country and themselves, it was brilliant!

We had a party on a boat on the river, we were having dinner in the “Machines”, we played “live” monopoly in the city, we visited a vineyard and we had some presentations so that we now now a lot more of each other.

We have a lot to do to integrate both companies but we are all very enthusiastic about the opportunities.

I added some pictures of Nantes and the fantastic weekend we had.

What is the impact of the cooperation for Rhapsody?

We hope a lot and not a lot… what I mean is that I hope that the effects will be positive for our customers. We are now selling our Rhapsody version in France and in the USA as well, that is good, the more customers the better the product gets.

Together with Sodius we own a large part of the Rhapsody eco-system. We now do the code generator, the framework, the XMI and AUTOSAR import and export and some more. It is good to have that in one company, that improves the interfaces for the extensions. Our very close cooperation and vicinity to and with BTC is also an advantage.

Furthermore we now have an extremely interesting product that we will be developing further together, SEcollab. This is a tool that can read data from various other tools like Rhapsody, Doors, EA, MagicDraw, Simulink, MS Office and many more sources, of course it can handle OSLC. It then presents this data in a web browser, readable for everybody (who has the access rights of-course) It can then help you link the information and support in doing reviews.

Other use-cases are the ability to do global configuration (not yet fully implemented) It can even act as a viewer for the data from all sources ( so also Rhapsody! I don’t know how many people have asked me for that in the passed years…)

I will write more about SEcollab in one of the next BLOG entries.

For now, happy modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)