Ruby-cradle is an extension to the Ruby programming language (http://www.ruby-lang.org) for accessing the C API of Cradle, a system engineering tool produced by 3SL (http://www.threesl.com/).

The Cradle API was designed for static linking. It can work as a shared library, but has some quirks. For example, only one user on a given system can access the Cradle API at a given time. Others encounter an error. There is also a short refractory period (approximately 10 s) after shutting down a Cradle API application during which any attempt to start another causes a connection error. Within these constraints, it appears to work.

The Ruby extension is known to work on Linux with gcc. It has been built successfully and tested on Windows with the one-click installer and Microsoft's freely-downloadable compiler tools.

Build Instructions

1. Type
   

      ./configure [cradle-home-dir]

   .
   If your CRADLEHOME environment variable is set, you can omit the argument. You should see the message
   

      checking for main() in -lcradleapi... yes

   
   
   
2. Type
   

      ruby setup.rb setup

   
   This step compiles the extension and builds the shared library. It also builds the Rdoc documentation, which can be found in the 'doc' subdirectory.
   
   
3. Type
   

      ruby setup.rb install

   
   You will need administrative privilege for this step.
   

Testing