GUI approach to programming of TMO frames

While improved methods for engineering highly reliable distributed real-time embedded-computing (DRE) systems appear regularly these days, challenging issues still exist for easy programming such application systems that offer sufficient reliability. A concrete approach formulated by the first co-author together with his research collaborators is called the TMO (Time-triggered Message-triggered Object) structuring scheme, which is a syntactically simple and natural but semantically powerful extension of the conventional object structure. TMO programming has been enabled without creating any new language or compiler. Instead, an API that wraps around the execution support services of a middleware named the TMO Support Middleware (TMOSM) was provided. This paper presents another approach of TMO programming, named as Visual Studio for TMO (ViSTMO), which is a GUI tool for interactive design of TMO-network structures and automate generation of code-frameworks. The functionality of and the implementation techniques used in ViSTMO are discussed in this paper. Our research and development in this direction during the past year has revealed that this GUI-based code-framework generation approach is much more cost-effective than the macro-based approach