Software Tools

Migration Support

A migration cookbook has been delivered by the Global CAPE-OPEN project to assist with migration of legacy software to the CO standard. It addresses migration issues, strategies, methods and tools as well as experiences.
Currently, two Migration wizards are publicly available from CO-LaN that can be used for Unit Operation and Property Package component development. The Unit Operation Wizard is implemented as a plug-in for Visual Basic 6.0 and guides a developer on the steps to be taken towards producing a CAPE-OPEN compliant software component. More...

Code examples

Source code examples are proving a good starting point for development.

In the course of the design of version 1.1 of the Thermodynamic and Physical Properties interface, CO-LaN has supported the development of one such example in Visual Basic 6.0 for a Property Package and a Property Calculator compliant with CAPE-OPEN 1.1 Thermodynamic and Physical Properties interface specification. More... This first example relied on proprietary code for the calculation part. This was supplied by InfoChem. It was felt necessary to provide a more complete source code example. This has been done in 2011 with this release: Thermo System, Property Package Manager and Property Package source code in both Visual Basic 6 and C++ have been developed by AmsterCHEM under contract with CO-LaN and made available. More...

Another example, in C++, has been made available by AmsterCHEM for a water and steam property package.

CO-LaN has also supported the development of two Unit Operations examples by AmsterCHEM, one in Visual Basic 6 and the other one in C++. Both examples are simple mixer-splitters and are provided in the same installation package. They are consuming either thermodynamic objects under version 1.0 or version 1.1 of the CAPE-OPEN standards.

CO Tester 

The CO Tester checks the basic conformity with CAPE-OPEN standards of a component implementing, at this stage, either the UNIT or the THRM interface sets as defined in the standards. The CO Tester acts as a basic simulation environment where software components can be plugged in. It has been designed to automatically carry out a number of testing scenarios. The CO Tester needs only to be downloaded (free of charge) and installed (currently, only a Windows executable is available). It comes with a help functionality explaining how to use the tool and its various features. More...

Logging and Testing Tool

CO-LaN has developed a software tool capable to log all the interactions taking place between a CAPE-OPEN Process Modelling Component and a CAPE-OPEN Process Modelling Environment. The tool, named COLTT (for CAPE-OPEN Logging and Testing Tool), does not change the global interaction between the PMC and the PME.
COLTT is made available as an open source code and the corresponding project is hosted at SourceForge. COLTT includes a Viewer that simplifies scanning of log files for errors. The most recent documentation for potential developers of COLTT can be found here (COLTT Development) as a PDF file. The most recent COLTT version is 2.1 and has been released on August 28, 2012. The document describing the roadmap for COLTT after 2.1 has been updated in March 2013 and publicly released in April 2013. More...

COM-CORBA Bridging

As the CAPE-OPEN standard supports two implementation models one based on COM the other based on CORBA it is desireable to have a technology allowing the user to combine components implenented using COM or CORBA. As the two standards are not compatible a software tool is needed that establishes a platform for middleware interoperability. More...