10-06-2010, 09:09 AM
mecheil.edwar,
I agree with what you are saying to some extent. If we look at a few basic elements that the an engineering applications might need (take a frame analysis package or something similar) then we need:
1) Display Window - We need to display the structure and any loads, boundary conditions and results. Often we want to do this in 3D which becomes a real head ache for anyone trying to write their code from scratch. Add the complication that we need to interest with mouse clicks etc with the window and things start to look like a rather big task.
2) Convenient way of imputing data - Most likely some sort of spreadsheet style form to display and allow data to be edited.
3) Not always required but maybe some utility to convert between different units easily so the user is not restricted to one particular measurement system.
These things are not really language specific challenges (ie there are already multiple languages out there that can do this) - The challenge is making these items available so that one person might be able to use them to write a frame analysis package just as easily as someone else wants to write a program for seepage in soils etc.
I think if enough people were interested, and maybe I will start a thread of my own to see who might be, then there are enough engineers with enough resources in this forum to start developing a toolkit for a popular programming language that other engineers can use and contribute to for doing such tasks. I think this would be a more useful tool instead of another GUI builder like VB because it would have been written specifically for engineering problems.
Displaying 3D structures is the biggest problem I have when writing my programs. I have only had success with this in one language, MATLAB and sharing your programs is near impossible if the next machine does not have a copy of MATLAB. Thats why I am so interested to see what a forum full of engineers could do to make life easier for such tasks :)
I agree with what you are saying to some extent. If we look at a few basic elements that the an engineering applications might need (take a frame analysis package or something similar) then we need:
1) Display Window - We need to display the structure and any loads, boundary conditions and results. Often we want to do this in 3D which becomes a real head ache for anyone trying to write their code from scratch. Add the complication that we need to interest with mouse clicks etc with the window and things start to look like a rather big task.
2) Convenient way of imputing data - Most likely some sort of spreadsheet style form to display and allow data to be edited.
3) Not always required but maybe some utility to convert between different units easily so the user is not restricted to one particular measurement system.
These things are not really language specific challenges (ie there are already multiple languages out there that can do this) - The challenge is making these items available so that one person might be able to use them to write a frame analysis package just as easily as someone else wants to write a program for seepage in soils etc.
I think if enough people were interested, and maybe I will start a thread of my own to see who might be, then there are enough engineers with enough resources in this forum to start developing a toolkit for a popular programming language that other engineers can use and contribute to for doing such tasks. I think this would be a more useful tool instead of another GUI builder like VB because it would have been written specifically for engineering problems.
Displaying 3D structures is the biggest problem I have when writing my programs. I have only had success with this in one language, MATLAB and sharing your programs is near impossible if the next machine does not have a copy of MATLAB. Thats why I am so interested to see what a forum full of engineers could do to make life easier for such tasks :)