Running CAST

This is just a quick overview of the CAST commands.

CAST Servers

A CAST system can run across multiple machines. To run CAST on one or more machines, run one CAST server on each machine you wish to use. This is done using the cast-server command. Each machine should produce some output like the text below. The cast-server executable actually runs severs for both the languages supported by CAST. The numbers displayed by on the terminal are the process ids of the Java and C++ servers.

vonnegut:~ nah$ cast-server
Java server: 1301
CPP server: 1302

To enable the server to find your compiled components you must do the following. For Java components your CLASSPATH environment variable must include the directories and/or jars which contain the classes. For C++ components your component libraries (e.g. libHelloWriter.so) must be in the library search path. The easiest way to do this is to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on OS X) to include the directories which contain your libraries.

CAST Client

Once all the servers are running, you can run a CAST system by running a single client on one machine. This machine can be either one of the machines running a server or another machine entirely. The client is run using the cast-client with a single argument, a cast file. E.g.

vonnegut:~ nah$ cast-client /usr/local/share/cast/config/comedian-architecture.cast 
CoSy Architecture Schema Toolkit. Release: 0.2.0
[starting [1/11]: stage.subarch_wm]
[starting [2/11]: stage.subarch_tm]
[starting [3/11]: funny.man]
...

The cast file contains a description of the system you wish to run. For more details on this file see configuration instructions. When a CAST system runs it passes through a series of synchronised steps. These are described in system architecture overview.

To shut down a running CAST system, CTRL-C the client. This will send the appropriate signals to the servers, halting execution and destroying the components. Once a system has been shut down, you can run the client again without restarting the servers.