Rigi Getting Started

Purpose

Rigi is a ReverseEngineering environment. It consists of a set of tools: parsers, command-line utilities, and an interactive graph editor. The core of the system is the graph editor, RigiEdit, and most people that are interested in Rigi are actually interested in the graph editor. (In fact, the parsers are no longer supported.)

Rigi is a system for understanding large information spaces such as software programs, documentation, and the World Wide Web. This is done through a reverse engineering approach that models the system by extracting artifacts from the information space, organizing them into higher level abstractions such as components, and presenting the model graphically with RigiEdit.The choice of abstraction depends on its intended function, the intended audience, the application area, and the goals of the modeling exercise.

If you want to dive deeper, check out the RigiPublications. A good starting point is Structural redocumentation: a case study (IEEE Software, January 1995):

• /pub/Transform/RigiGettingStarted/WTMS-IEEESW-95.pdf
• http://rigi.cs.uvic.ca/downloads/papers/pdf/ieee-software-sr.pdf
• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=363166

Downloading Rigi and Getting the Rigi User Manual

To try out Rigi you can download a precompiled version of Rigi; look at RigiReleases. To play around with Rigi and to run some demos you only need RigiEdit. If you are a developer and work with the sources look at RigiDevelopment.

Also download the RigiUserManual!

Installing Rigi

Installing RigiEdit basically means that you have to extract the contents of the archive (ZIP, tar, etc.) into a new directory. This directory is referred to as $RIGI.

See RigiInstall for additional help if you run into problems.

Linux with (ba)sh:

> mkdir rigibase
> cd rigibase
> export RIGI=`pwd`
> export PATH=$RIGI/bin:$PATH
> wget http://www.rigi.cs.uvic.ca/downloads/rigi/ix86-linux2/rigiedit-12-Jan-2003-bin.tar.gz
> gunzip rigiedit-12-Jan-2003-bin.tar.gz
> tar xvf rigiedit-12-Jan-2003-bin.tar

To set the environment variables RIGI and PATH for tcsh, replace the above two lines with:

> setenv RIGI `pwd`
> set path=($RIGI/bin$path)

Windows:

You need to set the following system environment variables:

You can include the following lines into the autoexec.bat:

rem following lines are related to RIGI
set RIGI=c:/rigi
set TCL_LIBRARY=%RIGI%/lib/tcl7.4
set TK_LIBRARY=%RIGI%/lib/tk4.0
path=%path%;%RIGI%\bin

Running Rigi

The binary of RigiEdit is located at $RIGI/bin/rigiedit.

If you execute the binary, you should initially see the Rigi Workbench window and an empty root window.

When you start up RigiEdit, it checks for the configuration file rigicfg.env in the current working directory. If the file does not exist RigiEdit creates the file with the default settings.

Linux:

> cd $RIGI/bin/
> ./rigiedit &
Welcome to RigiEdit Version 12-Jan-2003
Copyright 1986-1998,
H.A. Muller, University of Victoria, All rights reserved
Configuration used: .../bin/rigicfg.env
> cat rigicfg.env

Windows:

Start RigiEdit by opening up the "Run..." dialog and then typing in rigiedit. This will only work if the path system environment variable is set correctly (see above).

Alternatively, you use the Explorer to navigate to the rigiedit binary and double-click on it.

Rigi's Demos

The easiest way to get a first understanding of Rigi's capabilities is running the built-in demos. In the Rigi Workbench use the "Demo" drop-down menu to select between three demos. More details are in the RigiUserManual, Chapter 2.