As you may know, David Harel is the "father" of the State Charts that form a basis for the W3C's SCXML project. An XML version of Harel's Activity-Charts is something similar to what you're looking for. Unfortunately, I'm unaware such an ActivityChartXML exists.
Relevant background is presented in Harel and Politi's "Modeling Reactive Systems with Statecharts" http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dharel/STM.Book/. In the book, the authors explain that other kinds of "charts" are needed to complete the conceptual description of what they term a reactive system. The authors outlined two other kinds of charts besides State-Charts that are needed to specify a complete model. One of the other charts is the Activity-Chart, which essentially captures a functional decomposition of the system. As you may know the functional decomposition specificies the outputs of a function, or activity, and the other functions that depend on the output. One way to specify the mechanics of calculating the outputs from the inputs in an xml vein could be accomplished using MathML. Incidentally, the other type of chart Harel proposed is the Module-Chart, which maps the relationship between activities and hardware/software/people that perform the activities. I would be interested in seeing an editor that allowed editing SCXML content in either graphical or text form. Perhaps someone will propose projects for ActivityChartXML with MathML and maybe even ModuleChartXML to complete an xml implementation of Harel's methodology for modeling complex systems. With appropriate translators to native code, the combined projects might offer a clean, high-level approach to quantitative modeling and simulation of very complex, interactive systems. Regards, Dave -----Original Message----- From: Anna Södling [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 2:01 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [SCXML] Actions in SCXML Hello, I'm building a diagram-editor for statecharts. The statechart should then be transformed into SCXML and run through an interface. The interface should be able to send events to and accept actions from the statechart. I'm just wondering if there's a (reasonably) simple way to express an action in SCXML? I mean, events and conditions can simply be placed in a transition-tag, but that doesn't seem to be the case with actions? I know that you can design "custom actions", but I'm wondering if there is some easier way to do it, or if there already is some way to represent an action? Sincerely, Anna <P><p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2" style="font-size:13.5px">_______________________________________________________________<BR> </font> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
