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Cradle from 3SL, the complete Model Based Systems Engineering Toolsuite, specialising in requirements management, requirements capture, model based systems engineering and for systems engineering software, support and consultancy, the logical choice: Cradle from 3SL.

May 2009 [Cradle 5.7]

Future Cradle Direction

For some time, 3SL has provided two Cradle clients, Toolset and WorkBench. Originally, all Cradle functionality was in the Toolset client. We introduced WorkBench to offer a client with a more modern UI and with better ease-of-use and customisation facilities. Over time, the functionality of WorkBench has grown, both by enhancing functionality that is specific to WorkBench itself, and by either replicating functionality from Toolset in WorkBench, or by moving functionality from Toolset into WorkBench.

The continued existence of Toolset causes unwanted complication in the installation, use and administration of the Cradle environment. On Windows this problem is compounded as Toolset is based on X Windows, which means that users of Cradle on Windows need both an X server (3SL supplies two) and a runtime environment based on Nutcracker.

We have eliminated all of these problems in the next major release, Cradle-6.0, in which the Toolset client has been completely removed.

The consequences of this are that:

  1. The Toolset client no longer exists
  2. All functionality that only existed in Toolset has been moved into WorkBench
  3. On Windows, Cradle will no longer need an X server or NutCracker
  4. The following tools will be discontinued:
    • Document Editor (DCE)
    • Template Editor (TPE)
    • Document Printer (DPRT)
  5. The Cradle licensing system will change as described in this newsletter

Our main reason for announcement in this and previous newsletters is the removal of the DCE, TPE and DPRT tools. Customers with active maintenance who are concerned about the removal of these tools should discuss their concerns with 3SL as soon as possible, so that we can jointly develop a plan for you to migrate to the newer, more powerful report and document generation tools that Cradle provides. In particular, we can discuss how to migrate to the Document Publisher tool.

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