aRby -- Alloy embedded in Ruby

aRby demonstrates the benefits of having a declarative modeling language (backed by an automated solver) embedded in a traditional object-oriented imperative programming language. This approach aims to bring the two opposing paradigms (imperative and declarative) closer together in a novel and unique way. We show that having the other paradigm available within the same language is beneficial to both the modeling community of Alloy users and the object-oriented community of Ruby programmers. aRby provides elegant solutions to several well-known, outstanding Alloy problems: (1) mixed execution, (2) specifying partial instances, (3) staged model finding.

Installation Instructions

aRby requires Ruby 1.9.3 or later (tested against 1.9.3-p327, 2.0.0-p353, and 2.1.0). If you are currently using a different Ruby installation, you might want to consider installing the Ruby Version Manager (rvm) to manage your rubies, e.g.,

rvm get stable
rvm reload
rvm install 2.1.0
rvm use 2.1.0

aRby also requires Java 1.6 or later (to run the Alloy Analyzer), and you must set your JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to your JDK installation (JRE is not enough), e.g.,

export JAVA_HOME="/etc/java-6-openjdk" ## or wherever your Java is installed

To download and install aRby, clone the Git repo, run bundle install, then run the unit tests by invoking the 'run_tests.sh' script:

git clone https://github.com/sdg-mit/arby.git
cd arby
bundle install
./run_tests.sh

To run a particular test, pass the test file as an argument to the run_tests.sh script, e.g.,

 ./run_tests.sh test/unit/arby/models/abz14/sudoku_test.rb