"When prosperity comes, do not use all of it." -- Confucius

Ajax Comes to CAD

Posted on Thursday, May 04, 2006 2:42 PM

A small CAD developer mostly known for contract work for other CAD vendors has announced plans for an Ajax-based CAD application “that lets anyone zoom, pan, change layers and markup a CAD document with nothing more than a web browser.”

The vendor, AfterCAD of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, says it will ship AfterCAD InSite later this month. InSite will be a server-based application for Windows or Linux, allowing the server to send CAD drawings to a standard web browser. In its announcement, AfterCAD says the product uses Ajax programming methods “to achieve the elusive 100% CAD Web user experience without the need for anything at the client end but a browser.” AfterCAD has set the list price for both versions at US$1995.

Click to continue reading, "Ajax Comes to CAD."  

 

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# re: Ajax Comes to CAD

5/5/2006 7:00 AM by ralphg
Web-based CAD hasn't been particularly popular due to the huge amount of data involved. Hopefully these Vancouver developers aren't riding the wave of a bubble.

# re: Ajax Comes to CAD

5/5/2006 1:34 PM by Kelly Janz
From the description in the first paragraph, it sounds more like a viewer for existing content than a full CAD app creating content. This may be a more reasonable bite for the technology to take. Still a useful proposition and one that I would look at for client communications and approvals if it worked as advertised. External viewers that require downloads or plugins etc. have not worked for our clients in the past, so something that worked with plain vanilla Firefox, Safari (and IE I guess) would be well worth looking at.

# re: Ajax Comes to CAD

5/5/2006 5:15 PM by Evan Yares
AfterCAD (formerly Savage Software) may be a smaller developer, but they also happen to be a founding member of the Open Design Alliance.

My suspicion is that that there's something deeper and more meaningful here than meets the eye. AfterCAD are experts at SVG -- the W3C standard for scalable vector graphics. With SVG support now available in Firefox and via plugins for IE, and with XAML (Microsoft's vector language, that is essentially an alternative to SVG) coming in Vista, this could get truly interesting.

What appears to be mostly a viewer now could rapidly evolve to become a full blown CAD application.

Good call, Randall. This one does bear watching.

# WebCAD 2.0

5/11/2006 3:52 PM by Pingback/TrackBack
Randall Newton has news on a Vancouver company attempting to sell an Ajax CAD product for $2000. "Ajax" refers to interactive Web pages, like the kind you get with Google Maps. AfterCAD's doing it with CAD drawings.

# Short items: Ajax CAD

5/11/2006 4:13 PM by Pingback/TrackBack
Short items: Ajax CAD
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