Development and Integration Environment

PDEKit is a toolkit that can be used to develop problem solving environments for PDE based applications using all the PDELab tools and also to develop components of the PDELab environment itself. PDEKit consists of various representations of the objects defined by PDESpec as well as a large collection of tools for manipulating these objects and other general tools (for example, a user interface development toolkit).

PDEKit defines and implements data structure representations for all the PDESpec objects in C, Common Lisp, XDR and FORTRAN. For those objects that have meaningful functional representations, they are defined for C, Common Lisp and FORTRAN. For the execution environment, run-time interfaces between various objects is also defined.

Since these objects arise in many circumstances, we allow a given object to have more than one representation in a given language. PDEKit supports this by providing representation convertors that allow one to easily convert from one representation to another. (For example, PDEKit provides a convertor that translates a mesh given as a PATRAN Neutral File to the in-core mesh representation defined by PDELab.)

The User Interface Development toolkit component of PDEKit is the implementation basis for the PDEView user interface environment. This toolkit defines a standard look-and-feel for all the tools/editors and provides library level services that one can use to perform various user-interaction tasks. The toolkit adhere to the Motif User Interface guidelines and is built using the OSF/Motif Widget Set.

Other generic services provided by PDEKit include distributed file I/O mechanisms (using PDEBus) and a generic object management services to help manage collections of PDESpec objects.

For further information contact pdelab@cs.purdue.edu