This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: StS 2007 Daily: 3D CAD in Smalltalk
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Computer Aided Design, Simulation and Manufacturing is rapidly becoming the norm in industry. The software complexity involved is best handled by pure object oriented programming languages and environments like Smalltalk for greater programming productivity and maintainability. Based on this conviction, the author used Smalltalk to create a motion simulator in 1992, which he later commercialized as part of Dynamic Designer Motion. Since then he has developed more simulators with more CAD capabilities like freeCAD and CADSM all in Smalltalk. His simulator is currently the basis of Alibre Motion which is a feature of a popular CAD called Alibre Design. Most engineering-scientific programs are developed with procedural or hybrid programming methods because of legacy issues. The author will show how Smalltalk had provided him the programming capability to develop the GUI, geometric domain, multibody dynamics, symbolic math, matrix algebra and solvers, Newton-Raphson root finder, DAE and ODE solvers, and interfaces to other CAD systems.