The CHARON toolkit Version 1.0

Downloading and installation instructions

The CHARON toolkit is distributed in two parts, which can be downloaded and used separately. The toolkit requires Java version 1.3 or 1.4.

1. The main CHARON toolkit. It includes:
   • editor, parser and type checker for textual charon specifications
   • model browser
   • visual simulator
   It can be downloaded as a compressed archive. Updated: January 23, 2003. The simulator uses plotting routines from the Ptolemy project. Installation. Place the CHARON archive and plot.jar in the same directory. Unpack the archive. You will get directory CHARON.

   Execution. To run the toolkit, execute charon.sh on UNIX or Linux, or charon.bat on Windows, found in the directory CHARON.

2. A visual editor for CHARON models, which can be downloaded as a separate compressed archive. The editor stores specifications in a flexible XML format and uses the Xerces XML parser. You can get the binaries from the Apache XML project or here.

   Installation. Unpack the archive. You will get directory CharonVisual. Put xerces.jar into directory CharonVisual.

   Execution. To run the tool, open directory CharonVisual and execute run.sh on UNIX or Linux, or run.bat on Windows.

WARNING!!! Netscape 3.* and 4.* on some versions of Windows will corrupt jar files.

WARNING!!! Depending on your settings of environment variables, you may experience an error when generating simulator on some Windows platforms. The error results in the error message "CreateProcess error=2". If this happens, make sure that "javac.exe" can be found via your system-wide class path. You can also compile the simulator manually by running
 javac CHARON\simulator\<projectName>gSim.java
where <projectName> is the name of your project.

Documentation. A draft manual for the toolkit is here. There is also a separate document on the visual editor.

Example. To get you started, get a CHARON model of a leaky tank. It is an archived project which you can unpack and run. You can also get a somewhat incomplete visual version of the same model. More downloadable projects can be found in the examples section.

If you have questions. Please contact the friendly folks at the CHARON help desk.