Introduction

Chapters

Application Design >>>

Contents

• 1.1 Some assumptions

Welcome to the Parasolid Getting Started Guide. This quick-start guide will get you working with Parasolid as simply and efficiently as possible. If you are a newcomer to Parasolid, it explains the steps you need to complete in order to implement Parasolid in your application. It also touches on other design considerations you need to think about, though you should refer to the full Parasolid documentation set for more details on these.

When you begin working with a system as complex as Parasolid, it can be difficult finding out what your first steps should be. This is equally true if you are developing a Parasolid-powered application from scratch, or if you are integrating Parasolid into an existing application. This guide shows you just what those first steps should be, and points you to code examples supplied on the CD so that you can get started as quickly as possible.

The contents of the rest of the guide are as follows:

• Chapter 2, "Application Design" describes the design of a typical Parasolid-enabled application, and introduces you to the various components in a typical system.
• Chapter 3, "Supplying A Frustrum" describes how to supply a frustrum. The frustrum is the part of your application that interfaces with Parasolid in order to provide file, memory, and graphics handling capabilities.
• Chapter 4, "The Example Application" describes a real frustrum implementation that is available with the Parasolid release.
• Appendix A, "Further Implementation Decisions" gives an overview of non-essential functionality that you might want to include in your frustrum.
• Appendix B, "Using the PK Interface" gives you an introduction to calling Parasolid functions for modeling part data.

Please remember that this guide is intended as an introduction to Parasolid. It tells you the minimum you need to know in order to get up and running. It does not mention everything you might like to know about, and it may not cover all the issues that are relevant to your particular application. You should refer to the full Parasolid documentation set if you need more information.

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1.1 Some assumptions

The frustrum code described in this guide addresses issues that are most relevant if you are developing applications for use on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If your application runs on a UNIX platform, you can find source code for a platform-independent frustrum on the Parasolid Release CD. See the Parasolid Release Notes for more details.

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