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| Challenge finalists demonstrate the potential of these 3D modeling components for the development of open-source functionality for CAD, CAM and other scientific and technical applications. |
Paris, October 22, 2001 – With their outstanding projects on the use of standard open-source tools (Automake, Autoconf) to build Open CASCADE applications and on the development of a 5-axis machining component based on Open CASCADE, two North American developers have tied for first place in the Open CASCADE Developer Challenge. Robert Boehne of Chicago has won a week's vacation for two in Cancun, Mexico, and Olivier Coma of Montreal has won a similar trip to Callinago, Guadeloupe.
The Open CASCADE Developer Challenge has demonstrated the interest of the developer community at large in the vast possibilities of these 3D modeling components for scientific and technical applications and has resulted in the enrichment of several areas of the software. Starting this week, winners will comment on their projects and their participation in the Challenge at http://www.opencascade.com/challenge/index.html. All new components and project descriptions from the winners will be available in Open Source on the www.opencascade.org Web site by early November.
The Open CASCADE Developer Challenge jury was made up of outstanding international Open Source, research and CAD/CAM personalities. Robert Boehne's project, which allows adapting Open CASCADE to all types of platforms and compilers, was judged by Frederic Bastok, co-founder of MandrakeSoft. Olivier Coma's project, involving components that can be used in other applications, such as those for numerical control or robotics, was judged by Michel Bercovier, Bertold Badler Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Judges comment on other winning entries
Two projects also tied for second place. These were the entries of Stéphane Routelous, also of Montreal, and of the three-person team from the Ecole Supérieure d'Ingénierie Léonard de Vinci (ESILV), Paris-La Défense. Each of the second-place winners received a digital camera in recognition of his or her contribution.
Stéphane Routelous created a modular application in the form of a reusable shell which proposes standard services like visualization or the save function and can accept the B-rep creation functions of Open CASCADE through dynamic download of a plug-in. Routelous' entry was described by judge Marc Evrard, well-known French CAD/CAM/CAE and PDM consultant, as "the careful construction of a dynamic plug-in link, based on a known technology but one which is difficult to execute with sufficient robustness."
Under the leadership of Jean-Marc Dupuy, Benedicte Martin and Christophe Rigo of the ESILV used various Open CASCADE components for constructing lines and circles from constraints such as tangency to develop a new Draw command for creating 2D contours. According to Dr. Denis Teissandier of the Laboratory of Physical Mechanics of the University of Bordeaux, who judged the entry, "This Sketcher application completes the existing Open CASCADE component offer. Since the Sketcher interface was created in Open CASCADE's Draw environment, it will be easy for new usersto take advantage of a construction mode based on lines and reuse this function in their own applications."
Giorgio Scorzelli of Rome, Italy, received a selection of fine French wine as third-place winner for his prototype project that adds MzScheme (a variant of LISP) as a functional language to the Open CASCADE geometric kernel. "The possibility of dynamic access to C++ code, in particular that of Open CASCADE, is of great interest to the developer community," says Dr.-Ing. Ralf Stefan Lossack, co-director at the Institut für Rechneranwendung in Planung und Konstruktion of the University of Karlsruhe, headed by Prof. Dr. h.c. H. Grabowski. "This would enable demonstrating or prototyping an application, testing Open CASCADE or dynamically obtaining information about the data structure." |
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