FXOC INITIAL PROJECT PAGE

1 What is FXOC?

FXOC is a FOX GUI Toolkit interface for the Open CASCADE Technology components

(3D surface and solid modeling, visualization, data exchange, rapid application development). Platforms supported include Linux, Windows NT/9x/2K/XP, and UNIX/X11 workstations. It is a set of FOX widgets intended to provide interface for the Open CASCADE viewers and Application Interactive Services. It is written in standard C++ and uses services, paradigms and concepts provided by the two libraries, so as if one gets the two libraries to work on a machine, which proves very easy, FXOC is guaranteed to work also. FXOC is linked in a static library, currently using the MSVC project. In the near future, makefiles and projects will be provided for many popular IDEs, Dev-C++, KDevelop and Eclipse being amongst them. Also, source code and project are provided for an example application, which is a 3D viewer.

The concept behind this project is to combine two powerful toolkits, that have been unrelated up to date in the open source, at least as far as the writer knows. The FOX toolkit is maybe the fastest and most efficient GUI toolkit available today. Considerable importance has been placed on making FOX one of the fastest toolkits around, and to minimize memory use:- FOX uses a number of techniques to speed up drawing and spatial layout of the GUI. Memory is conserved by allowing programmers to create and destroy GUI elements on the fly. Open CASCADE Technology is a software development platform that includes components for 3D surface and solid modeling, visualization, data exchange and rapid application development. Open CASCADE Technology is used in the development of numerical simulation software including CAD/CAM/CAE, AEC and GIS, as well as PDM applications. Both libraries are used in major proprietary finite element pre and post processing software with considerable success.

The license used is the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2.1 with the adoption of the FOX ADDENDUM TO LICENSE.

2 Where to get FXOC

You can find FXOC at

https://sourceforge.net/projects/foxoc/

You can FTP the complete FOX GUI toolkit from the FTP site:

ftp://ftp.fox-toolkit.org/pub/

NOTE: for convenience you can download FOX library v. 1.4.5

and include files from

https://sourceforge.net/projects/foxoc/

You can find the Open CASCADE Technology v 5.2 at

http://www.opencascade.org/getocc/download/

3 Installation.

Download, compile and install FOX library v. 1.4.5 and Open CASCADE Technology v 5.2 as described in the related documentation of the two libraries.

-- Open CASCADE installation usually sets up the $(CASROOT) environment variable. Check that this has been properly done.

-- FOX toolkit does not setup an environment variable for path to FOX root under Windows.

Download and extract the FXOC files. This peer version of FXOC is built using MSVC++ v.6.0. You will find a workspace in /win32/vcpp. Open the workspace, and verify that there are two open projects. Setup the include and lib directories for FOX, either in Tools->Options->Directories or individually for each project using Project->Settings.

Build the example viewer. Use Windows->New Viewer to open a test viewer and play around.

NOTE: this is a pre-release distribution of FXOC mainly for comments, ideas and objections.

In the future, complete linux makefiles will be released, as well as workspaces for other IDEs.

4 Bugs-fixes-additions-modifications

Please file bugs and questions to the list foxoc-users@lists.sourceforge.net. Although you are not obliged to do so, any additions or modifications that you make to the original files and enhance the library will be welcome.

5 FXOC License

The FXOC Library is licensed under GNU Lesser GPL; all the examples and demo programs are licensed under GPL.

If you write software based on the FXOC library, please include the following in your About Box, or some other place where a user may be able to see it:

“This software uses the FXOC library (https://sourceforge.net/projects/foxoc/).”

6 Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Jeroen van der Zijp for his vital help in this project, as well as

in other works in the past. I also wish to thank the FOX community for the help provided in the last years.