Xholon architecture

The diagram on this page shows the overall architecture of the Xholon tool, and how it interacts with its environment.

The Xholon runtime framework is a tool that executes or simulates Xholon applications. An application makes use of the services provided by a small core, additional base classes, and an extensible set of plugins.

Xholon applications persist as Java and XML fragments in a specific Xholon format. These fragments can be located in a file system, in an XML database, and/or are accessible in other ways.

At runtime, the Xholon framework constructs an executable or simulation from some set of fragments.

The fragments can be directly created using any Java- and XML-aware text editor. Alternatively, fragments can be created by transforming them from models, fragments and executables that are in other non-Xholon source formats, as output by various third-party tools. For example, a UML or UML 2 modeling tool can save a model in XMI or UML2 format, that can then be transformed into Xholon format. As another example, many system biology tools can save models in SBML format, that can then be transformed into Xholon format.

A Xholon application can itself create fragments by using genetic programming.

Xholon applications are optimized for transformability. They can be transformed into more time- or space-optimized target implementations.

Everything shown on this diagram is available with release 0.5 of Xholon, except for use of an XML database. This is an area that's currently under development.