Dear Desktop Engineering Reader: Big changes have a knack of happening under the radar, and only in retrospect do you realize that a big news event went down and you missed it. Spatial made one of those quiet yet big announcements a few weeks ago, and it slipped right by me. Spatial's announcement was about RADF, which stands for Rapid Application Development Framework not some royal defence force. RADF will, however, provide defense against wasted time and effort for the hundreds of CAD/CAM, CAE, and other developers that leverage Spatial's geometry kernel and translation and visualization components, such as ACIS, 3D InterOp, and HOOPS. Developers will use RADF functionality as a framework to create their applications. RADF comes with all sorts of core 3D functions and capabilities that end users have come to expect or really want in their applications. This means things like 3D viewing, camera manipulations, part and assembly loading, mouse-controlled panning and so forth. It even offers multiple language support. All of this is available to developers right out of the box. Now, with the need to code all this functionality out of their way, RADF frees developers to focus entirely on building the application-specific functionality that happens to be why they are in business to begin with. And that's the key. RADF enables developers to re-orient not only their development efforts but how they think about product development. Of course, RADF means reduced development costs, shorter design cycles, and faster time to market. But what it really means is that by eliminating all that time spent reinventing code to, say, handle tab-docking and interfacing with multiple documents, you can develop the features and functions that will blow your competitor's socks off. And, um, what does this mean for end users? It means that you can blow their socks off as well. End users will benefit from better and more robust engineering applications that offer more features, functions, and user conveniences than ever before. So, as I said, RADF is big news. I'm sorry I didn't mention it sooner. Still, you can take this as an opportunity to learn a lot more about RADF from today's Pick of the Week write-up. Check out the links to the videos—no registration—to get the idea of what RADF brings to the table. Whether you're an end user or a developer, RADF is going to change the way you go about your job. Thanks, pal. -- Lockwood Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine Read today's Pick of the Week write-up
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