gCAD HISTORY and STATUS

The gCAD project encompasses several areas of expertise:

In my own case (Iñigo Serna), in September of 1998 I was studying for one of my never-ending exams, for which I needed to draw some complex technical drawings. As I don't like the pencil or other old-fashioned drafting tools (such as programs for badly-known operating system) I decided to start a CAD program for the OS I use, Linux (yes: the exams usually leave me in such state ;-).

About this time a Swedish software company called Microform with a CAD program called Varkon was considering the benefits of the Free Software. The president of this company, Johan Kjellander, was contributing to other Free Software CAD projects when possible.

In one of those CAD projects there was a clever guy called Franz Reiter with similar intentions to my own ...

After some email correspondence we started to work together in November 1998. Since then, more people have joined us such as Gunnar Liden and Rune Svedin from Microform and my comrade Igor Fernández de Bustos.

Each of us brought to the project previously written code, but we quickly realised the first task was to discuss (and agree) on the internal structure of the new program. We have spent a lot of time on this apparently easy task, but to reach consensus we have had to change many of our personal ideas and preferences about how a CAD program should be (this is a very hard task, and work continues ...).

These last weeks I have been very busy with my exams, while the other people has been working hard on several of the modules. We now have Graphics and Database modules almost finished.

Now that the GNOME v1.0 API is completely defined, we are integrating all the working modules with a user interface to provide a basic usable enviroment. Of course, the other important task is to update the gCAD web page (another hard task this too ;-)

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Comments: inigo@gaztelan.bi.ehu.es