Plugins Kernel Specification GUI Ivette

Ivette: a new Graphical User Interface for Frama-C

Ivette is a new Graphical User Interface for Frama-C. It is aimed at replacing in a midterm basis the brave, although old, GTK-based frama-c-gui user interface.

As many Frama-C developers and users, we really want a desktop application. We finally ended up with the following strong design directions:

  • The GUI shall be a desktop application based on an HTML/CSS engine.
  • The GUI shall be coded in a language that User Interface experts know about, with very good community support and open-source tools.
  • The GUI and the Static Analyzer shall live in independent processes, with middlewares and protocols to connect them with each other.
  • GUI components shall be as much as possible agnostic to the precise meaning of static analyzer data; no complex semantic treatment over data shall be performed on the GUI side.
  • Static Analyzer plug-ins shall be ready to interact with some external User Environment, but without any dependency on the middleware that will be actually responsible for the connection.

Overview

Ivette has been designed with modern HTML5 technologies in order to explore new ways of interacting with the Frama-C platform. It is still experimental but ready to use for EVA-centric usage. This blog post provides a gentle introduction to Ivette. Any feedback is very welcomed!

Architecture

The technical stack we have chosen so far consists of the following frameworks:

  • A GUI desktop application using the HTML5 and NodeJS JavaScript runtime engine of the Electron platform.
  • A GUI code base written in TypeScript with the Reactive Programming framework ReactJS.
  • A Frama-C/Server plug-in written in OCaml, that provides an asynchronous, JSON-based, strongly typed Request System.
  • Each Frama-C plug-in will then register new requests in the Server plug-in, independently of any communication protocol with any external User Environment.
  • A collection of middlewares and protocols written in different languages to specifically connect the Frama-C/Server plug-in and the ReactJS code with each other.

The GUI code itself is entirely written in TypeScript and is split into three parts:

  • The Dome framework, which is a collection of carefully designed and themed high-level components, offering a predefined choice of features.
  • The Ivette framework, which is an application built with Electron and Dome featuring the main GUI environment and managing the connection with Frama-C.
  • The Frama-C plug-in components for Ivette are build from Dome components and interact with the Frama-C static analyzer plug-ins.

More details can be found in this article.