______________________________________________________________________

$RCSfile: manual.txt,v $

Copyright (c) 2002-2005. Christian Heller and the CYBOP developers.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts and with no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled
"GNU Free Documentation License".

http://www.cybop.net
- Cybernetics Oriented Programming -

@version $Revision: 1.3 $ $Date: 2005/06/14 18:30:46 $ $Author: christian $
@author Christian Heller <christian.heller@tuxtax.de>
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Cybernetics Oriented Interpreter (CYBOI)


Contents
________

1 Introduction
2 Usage
3 Development


1 Introduction
______________

The Cybernetics Oriented Interpreter (CYBOI) is a Virtual Machine (VM) capable
of running application systems defined in the XML-based Cybernetics Oriented
Language (CYBOL). It can be seen as connection between the computer hardware on
one hand, and the abstract knowledge models of CYBOL on the other. In other
words, CYBOI is the active instance processing passive CYBOL knowledge. A
compilation is not necessary to change and run CYBOL systems.

The theoretical concepts behind CYBOI and CYBOL are summarised by the name
Cybernetics Oriented Programming (CYBOP). It is the aim of CYBOP to enable
developers as well as users themselves to write whole application systems in an
absolutely flexible, platform-independent way, using the CYBOL (XML) format.


2 Usage
_______

CYBOI cannot be started alone, without additional configuration information.
A special configuration file has to be given as command-line parameter,
for successful startup.

To run an application using CYBOI, just type in a shell/ console window:

cyboi configuration.cybol

A number of example applications can be found in /usr/share/doc/cyboi/examples.
To start one of them with CYBOI, change into the following directory:

cd /usr/share/doc/cyboi

Afterwards, type in a shell/console window:

cyboi examples/exit/configuration.cybol
cyboi examples/exit_text_file/configuration.cybol
cyboi examples/exit_cybol_file/configuration.cybol
cyboi examples/helloworld/configuration.cybol

Read the example CYBOL files to get more information!


3 Development
_____________

CYBOI is written in pure ANSI C, currently tested under Debian GNU/Linux Sarge
and in the CYGWIN environment under Windows. It currently relies on the
existence of an Operating System (OS), whose hardware-driving functionality it
uses. Over the years, CYBOI may take over more and more OS functionality for
hardware control and -- one day -- even replace the whole OS. The CYBOP
architecture looks as follows:

CYBOL
  ^
  |
CYBOI
  |
OS
  |
  v
Hardware

To compile CYBOI, one has to type:

cd /home/cybop/admin
make

To clean up the program binaries and object files, one has to type:

make clean
