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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.

September 2008 [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.

3SL wishes to eliminate all such problems.

3SL hereby gives notice that the next major release of Cradle, which it is expected will be designated Cradle-6.0, will completely remove the Toolset client.

In Cradle-5.7.0.2 and previous releases, the Toolset client consists of a main UI that can be accessed without using any tool licences. Licences were only used when data was to be manipulated. In effect, the Toolset UI could be regarded as consisting of:

  • A basic shell that can be used without needing licence(s)
  • Tools and operations launched from this shell that do require licence(s)

The result of this major change will be that the WorkBench UI will now fulfil the same role as the Toolset UI used to fulfil, that is, the WorkBench UI will come to consist of:

  • A basic shell that can be used without needing licence(s)
  • Tools and operations launched from this shell that do require licence(s)

The consequences of this will be:

  1. The Toolset client will no longer exist
  2. All functionality that exists only within the Toolset client will be moved into WorkBench except as noted below
  3. On Windows, Cradle will no longer require an X server
  4. On Windows, Cradle will no longer require NutCracker
  5. The following tools will be discontinued:
    • Document Editor (DCE)
    • Template Editor (TPE)
    • Document Printer (DPRT)
  6. The Cradle licensing system will change so that:
  7. The Cradle-WRK (WorkBench) licence will be renamed the Cradle-REQ (Requirements Management) licence
  8. Users will not need any tool licences to start the WorkBench UI and login, but will need tool licence(s) to manipulate items through the WorkBench UI, in the same manner as was the case with the Toolset UI

This will be a very dramatic change to the Cradle environment, and we will provide more information in future newsletters leading to the formal announcement of the next major Cradle release in some months’ time.

Our primary reason for making this announcement now 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.