User-friendly tools for managing projects

T. H. Burnett, A. Schlessinger and M. Frailis

GLAST uses the CMT system to define and manage our software packages. This is a very powerful and flexible system, with many options and query commands, but can be daunting to casual users. To help our users (and experts, too) we have created tools to shield the user from the complexity, and need to remember the many commands.

The first approach is called VCMT, a GUI interface that displays and allows modification of the basic configuration parameters of CMT; provides a listbox of all accessible packages; and, for a selected package, exposes buttons to query status, like a list of all defined macros, or execute commands, like cvs updating or compilation. There are two flavors; a Windows version implemented in Javascript and HTML, and a linux version implemented with the FOX toolkit. A unique aspect of the windows version is that it will create Visual Studio files, and a workspace that contains all projects to build the application, with proper dependencies.

The other idea, for our linux users, is a script that provides a simple set of commands to configure CMT, checkout source files, build, and run the resulting executable. It has a SOAP interface to allow access from the internet or a GUI.