DFAify

About

👋 Hi there! I'm Justin Woodring!

I built DFAify as a hobby project to allow users to model and inspect the behaviour of basic DFAs. DFAify is a diagramming and graphical analysis tool supporting playback and stepping logic for DFAs.

Consider Supporting Me

If you really love DFAify consider supporting me! 💵 paypal.me/jwoodrg

Getting Started

If you just want to use DFAify, I recommend taking a look at the releases.

But if you're curious here's how you build from the source:

1. Install JDK 17, I recommend Adoptium's builds.
2. Clone this repo.
3. Run ./gradlew run on Linux and Mac or .\gradlew.bat run on Windows
4. Done! 🥳

Writing your own DFAs

DFAs are expressed in a very simple xml format. Here's a sample:

<dfa>
  <state name="EVEN A" ref="even" entry="true" final="true">
    <conn to="odd" takes="a"/>
    <conn to="even" takes="b"/>
  </state>
  <state name="ODD A" ref="odd" entry="false" final="false">
    <conn to="even" takes="a"/>
    <conn to="odd" takes="b"/>
  </state>
</dfa>

Rules:

• A DFA XML documents begins with a <dfa> and ends with a </dfa>
• A DFA must have at least one <state>.
• Each <state> must be an child of the dfa root element.
• Each <state> has a name attribute which will be displayed when they are rendered.
• Each <state> has a ref attribute which is how you will reference other states in their connections or <conn> tags.
  • ref attributes must hold unique values.
• Each <state> has a entry attribute which is boolean flag indicating whether that state is the DFA's entry point.
  • There must one and only one entry attribute flagged as true
• Each <state> has a final attribute declaring whether that state is a final state or not.
  • You can any number of final states including zero.
• Each <conn> tag must be a child of a state element.
• Each <conn> has a to attribute which takes the value of a ref attribute on a <state>
• Each <conn> has a takes attribute takes a character which represents the transition character to another <state>
  • Each <conn> cannot have another sibling <conn> which has the same takes attribute.
• All attributes are not optional.

Save this file with an .xml extension. And open it up in DFAify.