My first impression

[dimpflmoser]

Hello everybody,

as a professional developer of a cad-based GIS-System i was (am) looking for a suitable plattform independend cad system. I came across your system and was (am) quite pleased with it though there are a few shortcommings (for me/our purpose). I'd simply like to mention these points for discussion:
+ As we are working with very large files (my Testfile has in cademia-format 36 MB) loading is quite slow. On a 4 Ghz Machine with 2 GB RAM it takes on Windows XP more than three minutes to load, on my Linux-Machine (same specification) the drawing is not loaded at all.
+ It was not possible to convert the complete DXF-File (56 MB) I had to save each Layer as a single DXF-File. The conversion took a very long time but worked superb. (Again only on my Windows XP Machine)
+ As we only need to work with one Window, I'd like to close the other two (I hope this could quicken the application) but I didn't find how I can close these windows.
+ Will it be possible to display raster-images in the background of a drawing?
+ At the moment there is no German Version - For the future we could think of taking part in the translation.

After talking to my partner we thought about developing our next program-version (sheduled for late 2008 early 2009) under the GPL and we thing the cademia software could be a suitable basis by then.

I think tese are the crucial points there are loads of questions which i'd like to ask later on.

Tanks and regards

Helmut

[bf]

Hi Helmut,

Thanks for your interest in CADEMIA.

It would be great if you could use CADEMIA as a platform for your GIS application. We would appreciate if this could be done on the basis of the existing kernel. We would like to encourage you to provide your application as a Plugin: This would allow you to switch to newer CADEMIA releases and to fully participate in the newest developments.

We have no experience with CADEMIA documents of a size of more than 30 MB. I can imagine that it takes quite a while. Do you have a reference time of some other system.

We could easily remove the second and third window by providing a layout with one single window only. This would approximately speed up the loading process to 1/3 of the current time.

The visualization is done by View objects. We have developed a View that renders the components in a quite beautiful but expensive way. For 1.4 we have already decided to add a simpler View. We expect that this would speed up the process significantly.

What do you mean by "it was not possible to convert the complete DXF file"? Could you send us the file? We would have a look at it and would gain a better insight of the problems that you are facing.

Raster images are planned for a later release, most probably release 1.5. We publish new releases approximately every 6 months, so this would fit into your time frame.

Thanks for your offering us your help in the translation. At the time of this writing we think that a single version in English would minimize the effort to be spent on these objectives.

You mentioned that CADEMIA documents could not be loaded under Ubuntu? In Java the heap has to be specified in advance. We recommend the JVM switches
-Xms32m
-Xmx1024m

Is it possible that these have been omitted?

Regards,

Bert.

[dimpflmoser]

Hello Bert,

thanks for your reply. I think we will give cademia at least a try! Very important for us is that displaying raster-images will be implemented and as I read an DXF-export as well, so we have nearly everything we need! (Thanks)

Ok - to your points:

I succeeded both in loading a drawing and importing a complete DXF-File on my Ubuntu-System by using the -Xmx2048 -switch (it worked with 1024 but painfully slow). The conversion took about 15 minutes (The original DXF-File has a size of 53.6 Mb, the resulting cademia-file 59.3) the conversion time is ok!.

I made a few tests loading the resulting cademia-file:
It takes 1 min 35 seconds to display the first window, 2 min 10 seconds to dispaly the second window and 2 minutes and 35 seconds until the whole cademia-drawing is displayed. So it would be quite usefull to use only one window (can't this be achived via some preferences-menu, so the windows can be displayed as needed). On our current system (intelli-cad based) it takes about 15 seconds to display the drawing. But it is not necessary to load the picture that fast, anything around a minute would be ok.

Zooming to a window takes about 13 seconds - a bit slow, but ok. Zooming again to extends takes another 35 seconds (we shoud reach here somthing about half of the time).

I think from this point of view your system looks very promising.

Just to have something to do over the days between the years, may I ask a few questions?

As Im quite pleased by the thougt of building a plugin I'd like to know if you have some kind of documentation, especially of interest is how it can be achived to react on an event - i.e. we need to select a text item and return the text value to our plugin.

Are there any conventions for building plugins?

Are you using swing or swt as your gui-toolkit? I think it is important to maintain the look and feel of your main application (which is very good).

Ok, I think tese are my main questions for the moment.

I whish you a merry christmas and a happy new year.

Regards

Helmut

[bf]

Hi Helmut,

Good to hear that loading on your Ubuntu machine is fine now.

We have decided to enable different window layouts and a simpler and faster operating view as soon as possible, most likely still in 1.4.

Concerning the programming of a CADEMIA extension. We will make available our JavaDoc developer documentation to you. This is the main source of information for developers since it allows us to keep the code and the documentation together.

On the other side it would be convenient for people that just start programming CADEMIA to get a somewhat smoother introduction. We are working on such an introduction. We will make it available to you as soon as it is finished.

Regards,

Bert.

[kasper]

Are there known issues about dxf-importing? I tried to import a testfile from acad [7MB], but i didn't manage to import it. Second time I tried to do it with a version 2000-dxf but this also didn't work. Is there something special to be done [using blocks / layer, you name it]? Exchange with other cad-programs is definetely crucial for me, so I'm happy to read you are working on an export function! Is there allready anything known about a release schedule or am I going too fast?;)
Regards, Kasper

[bf]

DXF import should work fine. Could you please send us the error message you received? Or even better: could you provide us the DXF file itself so that we can have a look at the problem?

We don't have a strict release schedule. The DXF export has a high priority for us. It should be available in 2008.

[kasper]

Hello Bert,

The text is the following:

Error while parsing line 4705 and column 1:
74
0
Got a RuntimeException java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: line must not contain 'l'

I have sent you the trouble-maker by separate mail.

Great to hear dxf-export wil be there somewhere this year! The inbetween time I will study how to operate the program the best way...

regards, Kasper