Section: Software

User interface and testing

Participants : Guillaume Baty, Pierre Puiseux.

A graphical user-interface facilitate the use of the C++-library. It has been developed by Guillaume Baty in collaboration with Pierre Puiseux (assistant professor at LMAP). All members of the team have been involved in the testing of the interface. The objective is to provide an easy way of installation and to facilitate the usage. To this end we use the python language with Qt in order to take advantage of higher level libraries, a more complete framework and designer ease which allow us to reduce development time.

Figure 2. Graphical user interface: option panel (left) and process panel (right) of the install tool.

Although the user community is small at this stage of the project, we are confronted with a very heterogenous background and level of implication in the development of its users. It seems therefore crucial to be able to respond to the different needs. Our aim is to facilitate the development of the library, and at the same time, to make it possible that our colleagues involved in physical modeling can have access to the functionality of the software with a reasonable investment of time. Two graphical user interfaces have been developed: one for the installation of the library and another one for the building and execution of projects. They are based on common database and scripts written in python. The scripts can also be launched in a shell. In Figure 2 the user interface of the install tool is shown. The option panel allows to choose the components for conditional compilation and the compilation type (debug and release).

Figure 3. Graphical user interface: project build panel (left) and parameter panel (right) of the project tool.

In Figure 3 the user interface of the project tool is shown. A project consists of a number of sources files and a parameter file used by the C++-executable. The sources define classes derived from the library, which are used to specify certain data such as boundary conditions and employed finite element spaces. The parameter file contains algorithmic information and physical parameters. It is generated from a database by the python utilities.

In order to coordinate the cooperative development of the library, Concha is based on the INRIA-Gforge. The tools offered by this development platform are adapted to our needs by our ingénieur associé Guillaume Baty. He has also develops tools for the automatic testing of components of the library using the cmake and ctest tools from Kitware.