Codegen should allow setting parameters from the command line

[cxbrooks]

Note: the issue was created automatically with bugzilla2github tool

Original bug ID: BZ#218 From: @cxbrooks Reported version: 7.1.devel CC: pt-dev@chess.eecs.berkeley.edu

[cxbrooks]

It would be nice if there was a way to set model parameters from the command line when running a codegen model.

• A first step would be setting top level parameters with something like ./foo -myParameter 2.0

• It would also be nice to set parameters within the model: ./foo -toplevel.inner.innermost.myParameter "This is a string"

Actually parsing the parameters could be difficult. It might be necessary to somehow mark parameters as being settable from the command line or something.

[cxbrooks]

We developed the ptolemy.moml.MoMLCommandLineApplication, which is a non-graphical application that reads in command-line arguments and runs a model.

We also looked in to passing command line arguments to Web Start (JNLP) files. Web Start is a standards based system used to deploy Java application in a secure manner where it is easy to update individual components. It turns out that parsing command line arguments via a URL is not permitted because the command line arguments are seen as being insecure. The workaround is to generate a .jnlp file for each invocation. We repurposed the Copernicus applet code generator to also generate JNLP files.