The new decade has begun and it's time for new releases of Model RealTime:
Let's take a look at some of the improvements in these new releases.
There is a new property page for classes, capsules and interfaces. It's called Nested Types and allows you to control the order of other types that are defined within the parent type. In C++ code it can be necessary to have the nested types in a certain order to avoid compilation errors, and previously reordering of nested types could only be done from the Advanced property page. Now with this new property page it's much easier.
The startup of the build server was improved in this release. A number of error situations are now better handled and if a problem occurs when starting the server error messages will now be easier to understand.
The model compiler now supports the C++ 11 construct rvalue references (&&). This allows you, for example, to define your own move constructor and move assignment operator. You can also use rvalue references in other places where you want a reference to an rvalue, such as in code snippets and as the type of attributes or operation parameters. The support for rvalue references was implemented by relaxing the rules of the type syntax that is supported by the model compiler. As a positive side effect of this, all native type references are now supported and will be transferred verbatimely into generated C++ code. For example, you can now use comments or compiler specific directives when referencing a type.
Note that this change is not fully backwards compatible. It's possible that your existing models contain errors in native types that previously were not detected. Now, when the native type is used verbatimely in generated C++ code such errors will be detected by the C++ compiler. If you get such errors you should correct the native types used in your model. Read more about this on page 20 in the What's New presentation for Model RealTime 10.3.
Documentation that previously only was present on IBM DeveloperWorks have now been moved into the Eclipse Help, under the chapter Model RealTime User's Guide. This includes wiki articles, newsletters and more. This work was done as a preparation for the shut down of the Connections part of IBM DeveloperWorks which will happen on March 31. A positive side effect of having the contents in the Eclipse Help is that it now is searchable from within Model RealTime.
All features mentioned above are present both in Model RealTime 10.3 and Model RealTime 11. In addition, Model RealTime 11 contains a few specific bug fixes and features. For example, it has a new Libraries menu which contains handy commands for importing the Connexis and TcpServer library projects into your workspace. The TargetRTS Wizard command is now also found in this menu.
Mattias Mohlin
Architect for IBM Model RealTime