6 Designing a Rubette

The designer of a Rubette must derive from the Rubette interface and implement both methods. To make this task easier for the programmer, the abstract base class AbstractRubette is available that already implements an execute method which dispatches methods based on the name of the command invoked via execute. The implementor of the concrete Rubette thus only has to write the methods for the commands which the Rubette will support. As an example consider a command named Calculate. In this case there will have to be a method with the following signature:

In general, the method for a command is called like the name of the command with cmd prepended. The argument params contains the list of parameters, that can be retrieved using the ParameterList class. The second argument and the result are the argument and the result denotators of the command.

The abstract base class also contains a simple implementation of identify. The derived Rubette class requires an implementation of the method makeIdentification that returns an identification denotator. There are a few classes that help build such a denotator.

7 Interfacing with other Software

Considering that communication between Rubettes uses denotators exclusively, it may be asked how the complete RUBATO system may be connected to existing Java software. Or, the other way round, how can other software systems be integrated in RUBATO. Applications produce arbitrary data that could be displayed to great advantage in the 3D interface and visualization system provided by the PrimaVista browser.