We are happy to release Xsemble 4.2. The biggest addition in this release is the Quick design mode. It is made with the aim of making the process of Xsemble design easy — almost as easy as drawing a flowchart — while still retaining all other aspects that make it useful for software generation.

Further, we have added a brand new ‘Quick start’ guide to our documentation. Not very surprisingly, it highlights how one can work with the Quick design mode.

Let’s look at what changes exactly.

Designing an application in Xsemble needed a lot of switching between the Assembler’s Workbench and the Developer’s Workbench:

  1. You identify the need of a node in the X-flowchart; but you cannot add it right away in the Assembler’s Workbench.
  2. You have to go to Developer’s Workbench, create a component first.
  3. Then you come back to Assembler’s Workbench and create a node based on the component.
  4. Now, based on the needs of the application functionality, you identify the need to add a port to this node to take some additional data. You cannot do it in Assembler’s Workbench where you were seeing this flow.
  5. Then you come back to Developer’s Workbench, find the component and add the required argument
  6. Then you go back to Assembler’s Workbench and refresh to see the changes and then make the desired connection.

With the Quick design mode, this gets simplified to:

  1. You identify the need of a node in the X-flowchart, and add that node right away. (When you do not have a base component, Xsemble quietly creates a virtual base component for this node.)
  2. Now suppose you want to add a port to this node to take additional data, you can go ahead and add the port right there. (Xsemble takes in the details that are needed for the argument as well, and adds the port to the base component.)

Isn’t this the way you would think while creating a flowchart with a flowchart drawing tool?

This speeds up the design, and also adds flexibility to the way you do it. For instance, if you want to only create the control flow first and worry about data flow later, you have the flexibility of doing that.

Some people would be using Xsemble only for designing. Their work becomes easier now.

Download the new Xsemble, and tell us what you are designing with it today.