Currently, the GUI supports starting a local server component (the UPPAAL engine) or to connect to a remote server. Communication with local servers is via pipes and to remote servers via TCP/IP. The problem is that the remote server needs to be started explicitly and that the server is unprotected, i.e., anybody can connect to it. Also, there is no GUI support for connecting to a remote server - the server must be specified on the command line when starting the GUI. What we need is for the GUI to be able to login to a remote system via ssh, start a server process and communicate with that server process via ssh (i.e. a pipe). We need support for selecting and initiating such a connection from within the GUI. We could even consider a system, where the GUI uploads the server binary to the remote system via ssh rather than relying on UPPAAL being installed on the remote machine. Via the same GUI it should be possible to select machines to which to connect via TCP or select different local server binaries to run. A graphical interface should be designed to support these features. One can consider a system where one can configure a number of profiles/sessions, which can be easily activated. Some graphical FTP clients have such functionallity: They can either connect immediately to some server or create a session for easy activation at a later point. I consider this to be imporant functionallity that should be included during the 3.5 development cycle.
Mads is too busy to work on these things. Robert, I hope you can find some time to do some work on these items.
I found a few Java ssh implementations that can be used as a library and are released under a compatible license: http://www.ganymed.ethz.ch/ssh2/ http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/ A list of other Java ssh things: http://linuxmafia.com/ssh/java.html These should allow you to do an ssh login on a remote server and start the UPPAAL server (without relying on ssh being installed on the system).
ok