Keynote
Neil Peterson heads up the Open Design Alliance, and started off the two-day conference here in Prague with several assertive statements: "We have been known as 'the DWG guys', but today we support seven file formats. We promote open standards, and not just for DWG. We don't set standards, we are active developers; we are not a legacy organization, we are not a maintenance organization."
With Autodesk not updating the DWG format for several years, ODA has been able to redirect resources to other areas. Members get access to
- Teigha Kernel (new term)
- Teigha Drawings (DWG, DXF, DGN)
- Teigha PRC (3D PDF)
- Teigha Architecture (ADT)
Additional licensing fees needed to access the following, because they are developed separately from ODA:
- Teigha Mechanical
- Teigha Civil
- Teigha BIM (new)
The latest version of DWG is still based on the version rewritten back for Release 13 in the mid-1990s, and so it is not efficient for network use, such as server-client computing (aka "the cloud"). It does have incremental saves, but this does not show you what changed; it has no history. ODA is working on saving revision history through the Undo mechanism. This is an efficient way to send modification transactions as small amounts of information.
Teigha supports all operating systems, desktop and mobile, including some that don't appear in market share pie charts.
Teigha for the Cloud
Teigha Cloud is not specific to DWG, but handles many file formats. It does data streaming, spatial filtering, and levels of detail to help speed the delivery of vector data over the Intertubes:
- Data streaming breaks the file into small chunks
- Spatial filtering hides entities that do not appear in the viewport
- Levels of detail displays entities with less detail when zoomed out
ODA is first to add history of drawing modifications to DWG, not even Autodesk has this function. We will hear later today how it works. History is saved in a separate file, to ensure the Teigha version is compatible with Autodesk's DWG.
Multi-user editing is currently at alpha level as a technology preview. I think the speaker said it would ship in December.
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