Port Types

To facilitate the creation of components, templates have been written to help the programmer create input and outport ports that will become members of their component. These templates are called InputPort and OutputPort. The template parameter indicates the data type the the port handles.

In order for a class T to be a port data type (i.e. in order to instantiate InputPort<T> or OutputPort<T>), we must define the following functions for T: HPCxx_String T::typeID(); This method returns an identifier for the type T. If objects of type T are passed between the component and the CAT (for example, configuration parameters), then the value of the identifier should match the fully qualified file name for the corresponding type at the CAT (in the java code).

 
void hpcxx_pack(HPCxx_Buffer&, T* , int count);
void hpcxx_unpack(HPCxx_Buffer&, T*, int count);

These two functions specify how an object of type T should be marshaled and un-marshaled. Again, if this data type must be sent or received from the CAT, the marshaling (un-marshaling) should be performed in the way that is compatible with nexusRMI.

ostream& operator<<(ostream& c, T& s);

This is an operator that writes some information about the object to an ostream. For example, if T is sparseSystem, then this operator might print how many rows and columns the matrix has, and some other useful statistics about the matrix. The string that gets written here will appear at the CAT, when the CAT queries a port about it's current state.

Java class at the CAT:

For KNOB port types created on the C++ side, a corresponding Java class must be created and made accessible to the CAT. This java class should contain the data field of the port type in the same order that they are unpacked by hpcxx_unpack() described above, and the java class must implement u Serializable. This will ensure that the RMI compiler will generate that appropriate code to serialize and de-serialize the object when being passed or received as an argument.

dastern@extreme.indiana.edu

Last updated: Tue Jan 26 16:06:16 1999