[freearchitecture] Presentation to the list and some ideas

[Rafael Villar Burke]

Hi you all!

I'm a young spanish architect living in Madrid. My present activity goes
from architectural design to structural engineering.

I'm very interested in GNU/Linux and FLOSS, and, actually, my tech-dream
would be to see a professional free software environment for achitects
and engineers!.

I have just discovered this list some hours ago and I'm really
enthusiastic about the topics you discuss here. Are you preparing a web
page or something similar as you suggested with archiforge?

For some weeks on I have been working on a python tool / framework for
structural engineering (steel and concrete elements analysis) that I am
willing to release as GPL'd software. I don't have experience with
Subversion or CVS, but I'll try to set it up and share the code as soon
as possible. Maybe some of you will find it interesting and I wouldn't
have inconvenience in contributing it to such a project as archiforge.

My opinion is that Architecture can benefit from FLOSS model and tools.
Lots of technically educated people, with Internet connections, sharing
a concrete problem... it sounds a good ground for it. Perhaps it's a
question of deeper analysis and providing some infrastructure to
articulate a starting point. Archiforge would do it great. What do you
think about it?

Your debate about a free CAD format and a CAD program design approach
catched all my attention, because I think any architect/engineer in the
free software community feels terribly the lack of such tools with
professional quality.

With that concern in mind, I have been following the QCad Mailing Lists
and lastly I am excited about PythonCAD. I wish this project gets enough
momentum to go along... till now it has been incredibly productive and I
feel Python is the right tool to do the job.

At this moment PythonCAD developers are starting to debate on file
formats, and it seems they already have a working DWG and DXF importer
and exporter, but they will probably use XML for a native file format,
so perhaps it would be interesting to get in touch with them to give
some ideas. Even more so, as there's a "working" draft in perl!

The approach of organising entities as files has already been taken by a
comercial CAD tool used in Architecture and Urban planning called Arris.
This tool appeared several years ago and ran on top of a Xenix OS and
now M$-NT, but I think nobody else has repeated that strategy so far. As
you stated it is an easy way to allow concurrent editing.

Another tool that came to my mind reading your proposals is LDAP. It is
a database system implemented with information organised in files and
directories to represent objects and its structure and relationships.

Some objections I see in the entity=file approach is that files usually
organise as B-Trees for searching, and R-Trees or Quad-trees are best
fit for CAD databases. With large sets of data this could be an
important issue, but I have no tests nor data about this.

Another subject I also think it's important is the XML one. I tend to
think that the advantages of the format surpass its disadvantages.

Some reasons are:

- XML tools are starting to flourish and it will surely be a widely
supported format. Wouldn't it be great to have these tools for use with
CAD data?.

- XML allows validation.

- As to the lack of space-awareness of the XML format, wouldn't any
human readable format probably show the same problem?. Furthermore, if
the tools used to generate the data are shared between users this
problem should not arise unless someone draws "by hand".

- It can supply the needed structure to the whole data set which will be
necessary if a lot of different files are used. This also minimises the
previous problem.

- There's a lot of work done in SVG DTD's that we could benefit of.
I perceive a trend in architectural day-to-day work towards using
advanced layout techniques such in tools as CorelDraw. And as vector
graphics programs are starting to massively adopt XML formats the
possibility to interact with them becomes important.

Well, I hope you find this discussion interesting and the project goes
on...

Rafael Villar Burke