Installing the Pathway Logic Assistant (PLA)

Preliminaries

The Pathway Logic Assistant (PLA) relies on several programs that must be installed to use it. Below are instructions for obtaining those programs that you don't already have. Followed by the very simple instructions for installing and running PLA. Hopefully you won't be discouraged. As PLA matures, installation will get simpler, and once you have all the auxilliaries, updates will be easy!

PLA requires Maude and the IOP Platform along with the dot graph layout utilities to be installed. Furthermore, you need to have Java 5.0 and Perl properly installed.

We support Linux and Mac OS X platforms as the required programs run on these. If you are using a platform not supported, you can try out Online PLA with the sample models supplied on our site.

Maude

PLA requires Core Maude 2.2 or higher. You can can obtain the latest Core Maude from http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/download/. More documentation and details about Maude are available at http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/.

Set the MAUDE_LIB environment variable to include the directory where you put Maude and associated files. For example, if you chose to install Maude in "~/Maude/bin", then users running a csh or tcsh might add 

  setenv MAUDE_LIB ${HOME}/Maude/bin
to their .cshrc file. Users running sh or bash would use 
  export MAUDE_LIB=$HOME/Maude/bin
in their .profile or .bashrc file.

The IOP Platform

Download and install "iop"

Download and install the binary for your platform from the IOP Binaries page. You will need version 644 or higher for this release of PLA.

Install "dot"

For IOP to support PLA you need to have the GraphViz program dot installed. See the GraphViz website http://www.graphviz.org for more details.

Pathway Logic Assistant

The following assumes that you have downloaded PLA from the Download page.

Install PLA

There are two different ways to install PLA. We prefer using the "install" script over a manual installation as it does some checking of dependencies.

  1. Using script

    On the command line, change into the directory where you saved the two downloaded files. Then, use Perl to call the "install" script supplying the file name of the distribution and optionally a location where to install PLA. If you omit the installation location, the installer chooses the default directory "~/Maude/Lib/M2.2". You can view the installer's manual page using "perl install -h". For example, to install PLA into the directory "~/bin" use 

      $> cd <directory with 2 downloaded files: "install" and "PLA-v3.1.tgz">
  $> perl install PLA-v3.1.tgz ~/bin

    When the "install" script finishes successfully, it will print a customized message with a couple hints at the end about updating your PATH and setting an alias for the launcher application. You may use this output for updating your settings. For example, the message looks like (with the installation location filled in appropriately) 

      Installation of PLA successful!

  To run "pla" launch script from anywhere, add
    <install location>/PLA
  to your PATH environment variable.

  Enjoy!

  2. Manually

    If you are not using the install script, you must install the PLA distribution in the predefined directory "~/Maude/Lib/M2.2". Create this directory if it does not exist. Then extract the PLA distribution in this directory, for example, using the command 

      $> tar -xzf PLA-v3.1.tgz

Putting launch script "pla" into your PATH

After installation, we suggest to put the location of the launch script "pla" that is part of the PLA distribution into your PATH environment variable. Then, you can launch PLA from any model directory without providing the complete path to the script. For example, bash users may want to add the following command (replacing installation location accordingly) to their .profile or .bashrc file 

  export PATH=$PATH:<installation location>/PLA

Running PLA

See the Run page about how to launch the PLA application with different Pathway Logic models.

Are you looking for older versions? Try the OLD install page.