From time to time people have really great ideas on how to extend OpenSTA to provide extra features or simply make it easier to use. This page is intended to collect together some of the results of those ideas. We encourage this type of effort and some of these items will eventually make it into the core OpenSTA installation. Until then the downloads and links here should help you getting these extensions running. OpenSTA doesn't really have a well documented or stable plugin architecture (yet) so these extensions might not be quite as seemless to install or use as they should be. We're working on changing this to make it easier for plugin writers and end users.

Many people have assumed (wrongly) that when they run their SCL scripts from within the Modeler that the browser style display should update realtime to show what is going on. The browser display within the Modeler currently only shows the results of the HTTP GET's made at recording time. Anoop Joy and his colleages at Covansys India decided to do something about this and came up with BView. Bview is a seperate browser that is started from Modeler and updates as you run your script.

Unfortunately it seems that Anoop & Co. no longer have any time to keep up with BView and the original site set up to distribute it is dead. Fortunately the work was released with source under the GPL. As it is a fairly popular addon we've put it into the SourceForge filestore and are attempting to keep binary distributions available that match with the current version of OpenSTA. Eventually something similar will probably exist in the core distribution.

The source and binary packages for the latest releases can be found here on SourceForge. Installation and build instructions are included in the relative packages. If you have any problems or thoughts on the binary release then please send these to the OpenSTA Users mailing list Any discussion regarding building, changing or improving the tool should be directed to the OpenSTA Developer mailing list This type of functionality will likely find its way into a future version of OpenSTA so your comments and fixes can help to shape this.

Jerome Delamarche is freelance consultant that maintains the excellent trickytools.com Web site with his various software donations to the world. His free tools for OpenSTA have their own download & info page. At last check, his extremely useful tools included a command line tool to export the binary OpenSTA results files into text versions (opensta2txt), and a tool to help running OpenSTA tests in batch mode (opstabatch). Please check to see if he's produced more though...

The Links collection mentioned in the sidebar is user editable, so if you think you have something that should be added here - then first add your OpenSTA addon there. Once in a while we'll check those links and update the applicable items here. If you have an idea for your own tool/addon then the depending on your skill level and the intention of the tool there's a couple of places to start: if you think your tool can work without requiring any changes to OpenSTA itself the the OpenSTA Users Mailing List would be a good place to start trying to find help and/or testers, if you think you need to change parts of OpenSTA or need intimate details of the data structures used then the OpenSTA Developers Mailing List and OpenSTA Developer Web site are the best places to start looking.