Older blog entries for crj (starting at number 5)

I have put the 2D drawing services into a package/distribution where is can be maintained and used sepearatly from FREEdraft. Now I am getting back to the actual porting of the system. One of the things I want to do is to develop a plugin based command and menu system. I've wanted to do this for a long time - the way I do the menu system now really really sucks hard.

I wonder if there is a generic plugin system for C++ out there that I can adapt to my needs? Right now I am trying to use the plugin manager from Mindseye, but as there are no actual plugins in Mindseye, its kind of tricky to visualize what a plugin object should look like, and exactly how it should be build. developing...

Got the 2D viewer at least doing something with V. This was a lot more trouble than getting the 3D to work, as 2D drawing services in Cascade are not really available yet, or at least so cryptically documentend it is near impossible to figure out they work. What I ended up doing is taking a lot if code out of the samples program. Seems to work, but the 2dView::Fitall() function does not seem to work on the hand rolled InteractiveObjects. Hmmm. Getting there...

Got the Cascade 3d viewer working in V experimentally. Now I can proceed with using the 2d viewer and 2d graphic objects in FREEdraft.

If this works it will make designing new features into FREEdraft much much easier.

I can then look at OCAF and see what it can do. I wonder what it might be good for in non CAD applications?

Imagine having preprocessor macros leak into your program from a common library header file which turns

foo::Status()

into

foo::int()

or

bar::Convex()

into

bar::2()

Well actually I don't have to imagine. Because thats what will happen if you happen to #include<Xlib.h> and have the balls to have a member function named Status or Convex, which it turns out are X11 macros! Stupid little useless macros even. Well isn't that smart. "Um Nobody would ever want to use the word 'Status' or 'Convex' in a program!" Like they could'nt have used X11_Convex or something.

Just micro ranting cause it took me two hours to figure out what was going on. :)

Worked some on FREEdraft conversion project. Converted Drawable entity classes to use the open cascade Geom2d_Geomtry types. Looking at how/if to apply the Graphic2d classes. They look mighty attractive.

Dinner: Stir fryed half a chicken breast, sliced, in chili sauce and garlic with red pepper - in a small amount of way hot peanut oil. And served it over steamed brocolli and asparagus. It was super yummy. A Coke to drink, of course.

Today I am worked on migrating FREEdraft from my homegrown geometry objects and storage model to Open Cascade. - (the very cool smart pointers.) My plan is to use geometry and storage model of cascade, but not the visualization - as I think what I have already is nice.

The occ library maps suprisingly well to what I have already built in FREEdraft.

I still have major rewriting.. ahead before I can get it working again though.

And then some.