The SAFIRA Development Toolkit

The SAFIRA Development Toolkit is a software tool with a graphical user interface that manages collections of independently developed components, and easily identifies and uses the functionalities provided by them in order to produce a complete application.

The base toolkit package offers several built-in SAFIRA components addressing affective input, affective reasoning, and affective expression, which were used in the various demonstrators. Application developers may also create their own components and integrate them with the SAFIRA components. The Toolkit automates several operations related to the development of affective applications, and automatically generates code that handles the integration and the communication between the several components.

Component developers can use the toolkit to create new components from the scratch or by instantiation of built-in components. The creation of components by instantiation is a simpler process since part of the code is already defined in the built-in component that is used as template, whereas the creation of components from the scratch is generally a more complex process because the developer has to provide all the code. The new components can be easily added to the list of built-in components, and that involves only a few guided configuration steps.

The Toolkit provides a generic CRS (central resgistry system) for the components, and generates a great deal of code on behalf of application and component designers. Briefly, it generates the code that registers the services provided by a component in the CRS; it generates the code for requesting the identities of the providers of a certain service; and it generates the code that actually uses a service provided by a component.

You can dowload the SAFIRA Toolkit here. More detailed documentation and user instructions can be found on Deliverable D2.3.