OpenCAD – My First Book

I have been making noise about the Open Design Alliance on this blog for some time now. Most of the noise has been about the misconceptions surrounding the ODA and its technologies. And now to justify the noise that I have been making, I have gone ahead and written a book about it. The 92 page book is titled “OpenCAD – A Step by Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application“. I think the best way to explain what the book is all about is to simply list its Introduction here.

Introduction

Ever since the Open Design Alliance (formerly the OpenDWG Alliance) was founded, it has been busy reverse engineering the DWG file format as and when Autodesk changed it. Due to this the ODA came to be known as the “hackers group” who give nothing but pain to Autodesk by offering their members libraries to read and write DWG files. Autodesk already has a library called RealDWG which reads and writes DWG files, but they are known not to license it to their business rivals. Hence the need for an organization such the ODA grew and the ODA delivered every time Autodesk changed the DWG file format.

My company, SYCODE (www.sycode.com), is a member of the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) as well as a member of the ODA. I have been keeping a close eye on the cat and mouse game between Autodesk and ODA for quite some time now. In all the confusion, law suits and out-of-court settlements, there is one important aspect of the ODA that has gone completely unnoticed. And the purpose and motivation for me to write this book is to shed some light on that particular and very interesting aspect.

Every time the ODA reverse engineered the DWG file format, they improved their technology, not surprisingly, by cloning that of Autodesk. One thing led to another and they finally ended up cloning Autodesk’s ObjectARX SDK, the very foundation on which AutoCAD has been built. The ODA called their clone DWGdirect and needless to say, ODA members started using DWGdirect to read and write DWG files. And that is the problem which I hope to address by means of this book. DWGdirect is not just a SDK to read and write DWG files. It actually offers a full blown framework that can be used to develop a professional CAD application, complete with plug-in architecture and all. Applications built using the DWGdirect SDK are called DWGdirect hosted applications. The not yet released IntelliCAD 7 is one of them. Bricsys rewrote Bricscad as a DWGdirect hosted application in V8 itself.

This book is my attempt to show that the ODA offers far more than libraries to read and write DWG files. We will create the framework of a professional CAD application (which I have called OpenCAD) using nothing but Visual C++ 2005 and a bunch of ODA libraries. You will also learn how to create plug-ins that extend OpenCAD using the ODA’s free DRX SDK. And of course, OpenCAD will be able to read and write DWG files as well.

This book is divided into two sections. Section I deals with creating the basic OpenCAD application, wiring it up with required ODA libraries and adding features to make it a full blown professional DWG viewer. Section II deals with adding plug-in architecture to OpenCAD and developing a plug-in that converts it into a DWG editor. We will also see how the plug-in developed for OpenCAD loads and runs in Bricscad V9 as well.

If you are an ODA member then you already have access to the DWGdirect SDK and you can start building OpenCAD or your own DWGdirect hosted application by following the instructions in Section I of this book. If you are not an ODA member you can download the OpenCAD source code and binaries from www.open-cad.com and start developing plug-ins for it or any other DWGdirect hosted application by following the instructions in Section II of this book.

The point of the OpenCAD software and this book is not to develop a full blown free CAD application. Rather my intention is to showcase the various technologies offered by the ODA, apart from reading and writing DWG files. We will first create OpenCAD as a DWG viewer and then add features as we proceed.

OpenCAD is not open source for the simple reason that the DWGdirect SDK is not open source. However, all the C++ source code used to build OpenCAD and its plug-ins are available free of cost at www.open-cad.com. I have also organized the source code by chapter. So if you want to skip a chapter or two you can do so.

I have used Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 and DWGdirect version 2.06 to develop OpenCAD and its plug-in. The ODA offers libraries for other compilers as well and you can very well use another compiler.

I write software for a living, not books. So I am not quite sure how this book is going to turn out. I am going to need all the criticism that I can get – good, bad and ugly. Please do give it to me.

If this book ends up helping you in any way or gives you a better understanding of the technologies offered by the ODA, do let me know. It will make me happy 😉

So let’s get right to it.

The book is available as a perfectly bound paperback book ($99) as well as a PDF eBook ($49). It comes with complete C++ source code which you can use to make a professional CAD application that makes you a whole lot more money than you spent on purchasing the book. The book also serves as a good primer on developing DRX plug-ins that work with DWGdirect hosted applications like Bricscad V9, which will also help you earn money. So you see, its all about spending some money to make a whole lot more money 😉

For more details on this book visit www.open-cad.com.

And now, thanks to this book, you can henceforth respectfully refer to me as Author.