SFERE

SFERE, or OSM as its working-title was, is a graphic shell for PROFAN, a commandline operated, structural analysis program based on ICES STRUDL.

SFERE HISTORY

PROFAN was the core processing engine used in the research into the 'Bollen-model', a calculation model for simulating the cracking of concrete under pressure. The 'Bollen-model' was developed by the department for structural mechanics in buildings of the Delft Faculty of Architecture, and originally consisted of a large collection of small command-line tools.

The original goal of SFERE was to make the model more accessible for other researchers by combining all the commandline tools into a single GUI, sadly this goal was never reached.

SFERE had some excellent visualisation and editing features for the time, but they were quickly outdated due to the advent of the powerful graphic interfaces of the newer Windows operating systems.

SFERE TECHNOLOGY

PROFAN did not function well under Win31, so the bulk of the work consisted of setting up a basic graphic user interface under DOS.

The resulting framework had some nice features for a DOS-based GUI.

• Modular OO Core
• Multitasking; using a simple, but adequate daisy-chain.
• Optimized graphic/mouse/font routines for the 16 color display.

SFERE NOTES

This project was the first modular OO framework I built; The power of building an open application structure immediatly becomes apparent once the framework allows tools to be build to further develop the framework itself [the font editor being a nice example of this].

The generic GUI framework concept was continued, and developed further, in the aptly named Sfere2 [sfere btw is not misspelled, it is an acronym for Structural Finite Element Research Environment].

In turn, Sfere2's framework concepts are continued in the cornerstone project.

YEAR

1996