The runtime component of the Crank Storyboard Suite

Overview

Crank Storyboard™ Embedded Engine is the runtime component that drives the content developed in Crank Storyboard Designer on embedded devices. It is architected exclusively to address the unique challenges of bringing a rich user interface (UI) user experience (UX) to resource-constrained embedded devices. The Embedded Engine’s plugin architecture makes it easy to scale across product lines from simple displays to rich UIs. It enables you to use one UI solution across all of your products independent of the hardware and OS used on the device.

Architecture

The Storyboard Embedded Engine is a runtime framework that allows a description of a graphical application to be interpreted and executed. The graphical application description, known as a deployment bundle, contains all of the instructions required to render screens to a display and to process events that would cause state transitions to occur in the application, potentially leading to additional screens being displayed.

Runtime Framework

The separation of the visual display logic from the system behavior is achieved through the use of events. Events are asynchronous notifications containing a data payload that can be delivered to the Engine from multiple sources to trigger changes.

• Events trigger Actions
• Events can be generated from multiple sources
• Multiple sources can generate the same events
• Multiple actions can be triggered from a single event
• Events can be handled on all levels (controls, layers, screen, app)

Storyboard IO

The Storyboard IO API gives embedded engineers access to the Storyboard Embedded Engine though a messaging interface. This API is a library of functions which allow interaction with the Storyboard Embedded Engine by manipulating data and working with events and user interface components. Through the Storyboard IO API Embedded Engineers can:

Performance

Storyboard has an embedded engine optimized for each CPU/OS/Rendering combination. Each engine takes advantage of the underlying platform capabilities to increase performance on that target hardware.