The SLOSL Overlay Workbench
===========================

Author: Stefan Behnel < scoder [at] users berlios de >


What is it?
-----------

The SLOSL Overlay Workbench ('slow' for short) is a graphical RAD tool for
modelling and implementing overlay networks.  It is based on a data-driven
model that supports the abstract design of these systems.  This means that you
can use it to design an overlay description in the OverML language and then
map it to a networking framework of your choice to build an executable
implementation.  Once the generic mapping is available for a given framework,
overlays can be built, tested and modified in edit-compile-run cycles.

There is some additional documentation becoming available at
http://www.dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/research/OverML/

You may especially want to read these two papers:
http://www.dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/publications/pdf/behnel2005overlayspecification.pdf
http://www.dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/publications/pdf/behnel2005overlaylanguages.pdf

They contain a description of the language and examples for their use.


How to install it
-----------------

Slow is written in the platform-independent Python language, but so far, it
has only been tested under Linux and Mac-OS X.

The GUI is written in Qt3, so you need both Version 3 of the Qt library
(GPL version is fine) and the Python bindings for Qt, called PyQt.

Qt:   http://www.trolltech.com/
PyQt: http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/

Further, Slow requires lxml and MathDOM to work. You can get both from the
'contrib' directory of the Slow source distribution or from
http://mathdom.sourceforge.net/

Note that lxml currently requires a patch to work, so the official version
(0.8) will not work. The patch will eventually be folded back into the
mainstream version. For now, please use the version that comes with Slow and
MathDOM.


Once lxml and MathDOM are installed, you can run Slow under Linux directly
from the source directory by starting the script "run_slow.sh". On other
systems, try:

    PYTHONPATH="src:$PYTHONPATH" python src/slow/qtgui/gui.py

You may also be able to install it by running

    python setup.py install

or whatever you commonly run to install Python programs. Note that this was
not tested very much.


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Have fun!
