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I'm planning on developing a piece of software that reads & manipulates data in a .dwg file. Instead of writing my own library that handles the 'reading' of the data file, I've decided to use either RealDWG or Teigha, however I'm struggling to understand exactly how they work.
I wish to trial the libraries before committing to paying the license. I've noticed that RealDWG is a subset of ObjectARX (more specifically ObjectDBX), of which I can obtain a trial license. So, if I download ObjetARX, can I use the ObjectDBX subset to develop my application prototype? What are the limitations (if any) of doing this?
My other option was to use Teigha, would this be slower than using RealDWG in the long run? What are the pros/cons of using either RealDWG or Teigha?
Writing your own dwg parser is not practicable, it is a mammoth task and an encrypted format. Forget that "option".
Teigha has a trial, RealDwg does not. They both can cost similar or wildly amounts, depending on how many copies you sell of your app. There are links and more info on the Tag wiki to do your own research there.
ObjectARX requires a full version of AutoCAD to run, AutoCAD hosts the ARX / DBX add-ins. They cannot be made to run without AutoCAD. That's what RealDwg (or AutoCAD OEM) is for.
Teigha works, it runs BricsCAD and pretty-much every other CAD that isn't AutoCAD. Some clients may only want to use the "genuine" app which Autodesk will tell you is theirs. You will find that the majority of AutoCAD users have AutoCAD LT which does not support plugins of any kind. The alternatives that do support plugins are much cheaper than AutoCAD.
Your decision depends on the use-case of your software. How will your users use it? Do they use an app that can host your software as a plugin? All this and more.
AutoCAD dev is a complicated world, so is the market. Do lots of homework.
There is no more Teigha now, it is now called ODA (Open Design Alliance) drawings SDK. There are many ODA based products which can be downloaded and used as trial version. Most of these products offer API kits along with complete documentation. You can try one product here for 30 days with full API and samples to read and write DWG and DXF files.
ODA Libaries are very powerful now and support other file formats of Revit, Navisworks, PDF etc. in addition to standard DWG and DXF formats.
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I am using VFP 9 in Windows 7 for my DBMS and want to do this in COBOL for windows.
For a start I want to create, for my Retail Pharmacy, a Medicines List Table with Medicine Type,Medicine Name,Unit Price and use it as a look-up table for Billing in my Retail Pharmacy.
Then I want to create a Data Entry Form to get general Data like Bill Number, Bill Date, Customer Name.
After that I want to present to the User scrollable Alphabetised Medicine List when called with the first letter of the medicine name by the user with provision to enter quantity required for each required medicine.
After this is over, the COBOL app should calculate Itemwise amount (Unit Rate in Look Up Table multiplied by Quantity entered by the USer and then calculate the Total Bill Amount
and print out a Sales Bill with suitable Header and Footer and also save / add append the Bill to a file in the program-designated folder in my hard disk.
I am now doing all this with VFP9 in my newer machines running Windows 7 32 & 64 bit and also with MS QBasic v 1.1 and Foxpro for Dos v 2.5 a in my older MS DOS PCs running MS DOS 6.22.
I don't have a direct answer to your question - its a bit too open ended for the SO forum. But
let me guess, FoxPro is essentially dead and you need to redevelop your application for a newer platform.
You are not the first person to face this problem.
Rather than redeveloping your application in something
like COBOL on a PC platform, a task that may be rather daunting, why not explore the possibility of
migrating to a differnt product. For example, I believe there are several tools available to help migrate FoxPro to
VB.Net. There is some cost involved here (VB.Net isn't free, nor are the conversion packages).
This approach is not without some problems (you might not get exactly the interface you are accustomed to and
the converted code might not be very well structured or maintainable), but it should be fairly quick and uncomplicated to do.
The down side is that you are simply moving from one vendor solution to another. Single vendor solutions, even
those from large corporations like MicroSoft, sometimes end up being discontinued before you would like.
Another approach might be to redevelop under an open source product. For example, PHP-MySQL-Apache using
the wamp server instal could be worth exploring.
This may appear to be overkill for a standalone application but there is plenty of free support for this type of setup.
I do not recommend that casual developers tinker with the inner workings of complex open source
software such as this - but the popularity and open source aspect ensure it will be operable for several more generations of
whatever operating system you are using.
An additional point is that once you have rebuilt your system under a client-server model it becomes somewhat more
scalable and easier to deploy over a network should you ever want to go that route.
Why not use COBOL? In actual fact there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach either. COBOL is very
well suited for developing the type of application you have described. However, COBOL does not provide standard
database or UI components (screen management is defined but often poorly supported). Database and UI tend to be vendor
specific add ons so you again end up tied to
a single vendor solution. COBOL tends to be more
popular in large mainframe shops so getting good support for COBOL and related tools is difficult outside of
that environmnent. Try finding a recent college or university graduate in computer science that has knowledge of
COBOL and you will see what I mean. If you want to continue with COBOL, have a look at Open COBOL
which is open source and has a reasonably large support community willing to help out small time developers.
My best advice to you is to take time to research and evaluate your conversion/migration strategy before committing to
any one of them. There are many factors at play here, some more obvious than others, but choices you make
right now will have long range consequnces on the success of your application.
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I found a really cool piece of software under the AGPL license. I haven't heard of this before, so excuse the ignorance... But is it legal for me to simply bundle and use this product directly within my app (no modification) and resell for commercial use? Speaking of which, is there a simple table available that shows the implication of each open source license and whether or not it can be used by closed source, for-profit, $$$ type software?
It is unclear in your question how your program relates to this AGPL software. There are at least two possibilities:
If your software keeps the AGPL code as a clearly separated component that your code uses as an external program (e.g. in Java/GWT, Runtime.getRuntime().exec(params)), then your program does not need to be licenced as AGPL and you do not have to distribute the sources of your code, but you must make the sources of the AGPL software as easily available as your application (section 6d of AGPL v3).
If your software merges somehow with the AGPL software, even just creating a wrapper around it, in a way that the separation is not clear or they cannot "reasonably [be] considered independent and separate works in themselves", then your program can be considered a derivative work and therefore must be licenced as AGPL, and you must distribute the source code of both your program and of the original AGPL software.
I would like to stress that there is nothing wrong with charging for access / use of AGPL software. You only need to provide the source, nothing prevents you from charging a fee or earning money from advertising (like those websearch companies that run on modified linux kernels).
As per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
Both versions of the AGPL were designed to close a perceived application service provider "loophole" (the "ASP loophole") in the ordinary GPL, whereby using but not distributing the software, the copyleft provisions are not triggered. Each version differs from the version of the GNU GPL on which it is based in having an additional provision addressing use of software over a computer network. The additional provision requires that the complete source code be made available to any network user of the AGPL-licensed work, typically a Web application.
In short, no. According to Wikipedia the AGPL license is just like the GPL license with added clauses for use over a network.
The long answer is yes, but you'd also have to publish your source. Some applications use this structure, for example the official XChat windows builds.
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I would like to write a GUI application for management of information (text documents). In more details, it should be similar to the TiddlyWiki. I would like to have there some good visual effects (like nice representation for three structures, which you can rotate, some sound). I also would like to include some communication via Internet (for sharing and collaboration). In should include some features of such applications as a web browser, word processor, Skype.
Which programming language should I use?
I like the idea of usage of JavaScripts (like TddlyWiki). The good thing about that, is that user should not install anything. They open a file in a browser and it works! The bad thing is that JavaScript cannot communicate via internet with other applications.
I think the choice of the programming language, in my case, id conditioned by 2 things:
What can be done with this programming language (which restrictions are there).
How easy to program. I would like to have "block" which can do a lot of things (rather than to program then and, in this way, to "rediscover a bicycle")
ADDED:
I would like to make it platform independent.
There is no simple solution in 2010.
If you want to make your GUI platform independent, you have these options:
Run it as a JavaScript application inside the browser with a server running a program + database you like. Hard to get to work but the most simple solution for your users. There are good editors like CKEditor but they use HTML underneath, and sometimes, they are slow or weird. Also, they are absolutely unsuited for large amounts of text.
Use Java. Java is available for many platforms but not all. It comes with an UI framework called Swing that could be better. Java offers a huge set of frameworks and libraries. Most are free to use but it will take some time for you to select the best ones in your case. Plus: So far, there are no good text editor components in Java. So you either have to buy one or you must live with some ... oddities.
Use .NET/Mono. Not available right away for many platforms but you can find binary installers for Mono for the major ones (Linux and Mac) and Mono is available as source, so your fans can build versions for their favorite OS themselves. There are pretty good editor components for .NET but almost everything for .NET is either not free (as in freedom) or costs money.
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I have tried Festival, espeak, and MBROLA, but the voices are mediocre at best, and no where near as realistic as current commercial systems. eg this demo: http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html
What is the most realistic free TTS voice you have tried?
Lets start on what you want to use text to speech for? I use text to speech for WBT's. I use Adobe Captivate to creat e-Learning classes. I use the voices downloaded from Adobes website. I believe they come from neo speech. http://www.neospeech.com. They were free to me as I have Captivate already. From the website, they don't apprear to be free.
I have two options:
1.) Android's PicoTTS outperforms Festival, FreeTTS, and eSpeak by a long shot. Don't have an Android device? You can hear a short clip in this video to decide if you agree.
If you like PicoTTS well enough, Android has a synthesizeToFile() method that can save the audio stream to WAV. I'm not aware of any apps that use this feature, but you want to build a web service, so you'd probably have to hack in the Android java source code anyway.
2.) The next option is to use Google Translate, e.g. http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=hello+world.
This works great for strings less than 100 characters. Longer strings would have to be sent in chunks, but there is an app on The Code Project (with source) that already does this pretty well.
Have you tried Loquendo?
Update: I just noticed the 'free' requirement... Fulfilling both realistic and free is a bit difficult, but if you consider voices coming with the OS as free, then Windows Vista and Windows 7 have very impressive voices (unlike XP's).
I have been searching all around and one that I have found that is FREE and has some alright voices is yakitome.com1. This fit perfectly for what I needed(convert text to a .wav file with a better voice than the Microsoft sam crap using a free program ). You can choose among some voices(the best was AT&T's "natural voices") and create a file. The best part is that you can save it as a mp3 or a wav file. Just follow the directions under the FAQ's. There is also a survey and they talk about adding some awesome voices for free.(they would purchase them) Anyways just wanted to share some info because this is the best I've found all week and I've downloaded about 8 programs so far.
YAKiToMe! http://www.yakitome.com is free and has really good voices and adding new ones in multiple languages. I use the site to listen to pdf files and RSS feeds. They can also read email, .txt, html, etc. There's no software to download. It's a cloud-based implementation. They have a well-documented API. Audio books made with YAKiToMe! can be downloaded or shared online. It's a quality service and they never spam me. Did I mention it's free and you can input large texts?
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My old system involved using Microsoft FrontPage and a frame page. The top frame contained a (tree) list of the tasks and sub-tasks I'd need to do, while the bottom frame contained any useful project information, notes, etc. I'd invariably need to jot down. I used bookmarks in the page to mark major tasks while highlighting current tasks with bold and marking off finished ones with italic. I would use a third frame for navigating between bookmarks via. a Table of Contents of hyperlinks linking to them. It was pretty clumsy, but it worked nicely.
Obviously, I want to upgrade now. Any good ideas on how to get a new system in place that can do something similar to my old one (without the crudeness/clumsiness)? That is, a formal piece of software for that purpose?
ToDoList is pretty good. Cons: Windows-only.
We use FogBugz, and it's worked out brilliantly for us. Far better than JIRA, easy to use, friendly, powerful. Highly recommend it.
It has a built-in wiki for notes.
(Really easy to use!)
It has a bug tracking system that is
second to none.
You can even make your software
submit its error reports to FogBugz,
and it will automatically generate a
case with relevant information in it.
This feature is called Scout.
You can create releases and all file
cases, features, bugs, whatever by
release, priority, etc. the power is
all there.
And best of all, you can host it on
your own server or have them host it
for you. Nifty system.
Works on just about any OS and browser.
Unlike most web applications, it's snappy!
We are using Jira for task lists, version planning and time management. And Google sites for internal documentation and related things. In general most Wiki system will be good for the documentation and todo (e.g. Confluence).
TFS : Team Foundation System
Full source control & work item tracking all integrated with Visual Studio.
If you use Visual Studio, and work in a windows environment, I recommend this.
If you don't use Visual Studio I recommend you do ;)
You can also setup project portals etc. that display activity, reports, all that jazz.
Basecamp from 37signals is a great tool to keep track of your tasks and projects.
I use fogbugz s&s edition
I think that an Issue Tracking System may suite your needs, there are plenty alternatives from OpenSource to Commercial...
You can setup and use ASP.NET Time Tracker Starter Kit. It also allows you to extend it.