Using web-enabled devices

After assigning web manageability to the elements in a model and running the code for that model, the product automatically generates and hosts a website that accesses the components in an application through a built-in web server. The web pages created by running web-enabled Rhapsody code serve as a graphical interface for the management of embedded applications. By using the interactive functionality of this interface, you can remotely control the performance of devices.

Although web-enabling requires no knowledge of web hosting, design, or development, the development teams that want to refine the capability or appearance of their web interface can do so using their favorite authoring tools.

Besides its ability to manage devices remotely, web-enabling a device offers the following benefits to the development process:

• Web browser serves as a window into the device, through which you look into the model to see how a device performs, eliminating the time-consuming development of writing protocol and attaching hooks that report performance information.
• Graphical interface provides additional testing on‑the‑fly and debugging through visual verification of the state of a device before shipping to a manufacturer.
• Easily created interfaces, exposed over the Internet, serve as visual aids in collaborative planning and engineering and provide a vehicle for rapid prototyping of an application during development.
• Filtered views can focus customer-specific aspects of a model.
• Capability to refresh continuously only the changed values and statuses does not overload device resources.

To web-enable software, you must perform several tasks from both the server side (in Rhapsody ) and the client side (from the web GUI). In Rhapsody , you select which elements of a model to control and manage over a network, and assign web-enabling properties to those elements, then generate the code for the model.

To manage the model from the web GUI, navigate to the URL of the model. Pages viewed in a web browser act as the GUI to remotely manage the Rhapsody -built device. You can control and manage devices through the Internet, remotely invoking real-time events within the device. Teams can use the web-enabled access as part of the development process (to prototype, test on‑the‑fly, and collaborate) or to demonstrate the behavior of a model.