We are excited to announce the availability of toolkits for Tangram Pro™! As of today, you have...
We are excited to announce the availability of Tangram Pro 2.0! With this release, we’ve made some big leaps forward in our collaborative design features including an automatic layout capability that can save you hours of time in dragging boxes and lines around your screen. To expand the platform's application in a software-driven world, we’ve added the ability to generate interface code in C that is compatible with the MISRA-C coding standard for safety-critical applications. Finally, for those of you who have been asking for it: this release features an integrated Flex development capability that helps you track and manage revisions of your Flex code. Tangram Pro 2.0 is making sure our platform meets the needs of tomorrow, and we’re excited to share it with all of you today!
Collaborative Design
Hybrid work – remote and in-person – is the new norm in today’s workplace. Yet it continues to be challenging to collaborate on a system design without being together in a room with a whiteboard. While our tool has always been built for collaboration, Tangram Pro 2.0 takes some big steps forward and incorporates feedback from our users. We’ve added features like grouping and tagging of components as well as abstract connections to make it quicker to build and iterate on a system. We’ve also expanded our workspace with a number of new helpful features, such as tracing the flow of messages through your design, having easily-understood lists of components and connections in your design, and the ability to intuitively arrange your design with the appropriate alignment at the click of a button. Perhaps the most notable new feature is the automatic layout. Just drag, drop, and connect your components and let the design come to life using our tool instead of you spending hours rearranging the complexities of the system. Tangram Pro 2.0 is a leap forward in our design features, and we think the new capabilities will make it easier for teams to collaborate in a meaningful, intuitive way.
MISRA-C Interface Generation
Tangram Pro has been able to generate interface code libraries (customized software source code for sending and receiving message data) since its first release, but our primary focus has been serving our C++ users. Along the way we’ve picked up support for connecting Rust, Java, and Python to our generated C++ libraries, but up until now a pure C code library suitable for embedded systems has been out of reach. With Tangram Pro 2.0, users can now generate a fully-featured component software interface library in just C code. We set out to significantly reduce the required run-time memory footprint of this library over its C++ sibling (which we did significantly), and we also decided to generate C code that is fully compliant with the MISRA-C coding standard. MISRA-C is the de facto standard for developing safety-critical secure code for embedded systems, and it’s been widely adopted around the world, including being utilized as the foundation for the coding standard used on the F-35. With this release of Tangram Pro, users now can generate custom libraries of interface code for embedded, safety-critical systems.
Integrated Flex Development
Flex is our way of specifying data formats and transformations, and users of Tangram Pro have been able to edit it inside of the tool for a while now. While the power of Flex gets many of our users excited, we heard all of you who told us that having to switch away from your design context to a separate editor to update your code was less than ideal. Instead, you wanted that editor right with the design. Also, we heard you say that you needed a way to manage revisions of your Flex code inside of Tangram Pro so that you could tightly link your Flex code to your design. With Tangram Pro 2.0, we responded to those concerns. The Flex editor is now tightly integrated with the design view, and you have the ability to revise and release Flex modules as often as you’d like. Not only will this streamline code generation with Flex, it will provide tighter collaboration across teammates as new revisions are made available. Bottom line: Keep the feedback coming; we want to keep making Tangram Pro work better for you!
The updated design workspace provides greater definition to your system design
MISRA-C code-generation enables C code support for full industry compliance
The integrated Flex editor allows for faster revision and management of your Flex code to your design
Continued Progress
Tangram Pro 1.0 was released in July of 2019 with a simple design interface and a single code generation option. Since then, our tool has blossomed into a robust integration platform with toolkits for collaborative design, a whole host of code generation options, and a slew of features we could have only imagined in 2019. The Tangram Pro of today is truly worthy of being called 2.0. As with every new release, current users will have access to 2.0 immediately. Not a current user and want to give this a try? Reach out to us or request a trial.
As proud of Tangram Pro 2.0 as we are, we’re not stopping here. Expect more exciting announcements coming soon as we continue to push the envelope on how rapid integration with confidence can be achieved!
