ZwCad and DRX?

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Permalink Reply by Algol on July 17, 2009 at 3:01pm

I heard from zwcad representative they want to release ZRX in October

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Permalink Reply by Daniel on July 17, 2009 at 7:49pm

That's good news, I was wondering because the last time I downloaded their demo, it came with a few libraries and a sample solution, this time there was nothing and all references to DRX/ZRX seem to have been erased from their site, everything! including some of the questions I had asked on their forum last year. kinda weird..

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Permalink Reply by Deelip Menezes on July 21, 2009 at 5:38pm

Daniel,

My company, SYCODE, is a Sustaining Member of the ODA and I know that we are not allowed to distribute the DWGdirect/DRX SDK headers/source. I highly doubt that Founding Members are allowed either. So I suspect that the ODA told ZWCAD to stop distributing their SDK, which was basically a wrapper around the ODA's DRX SDK.

Even after they stopped distributing it in their installer, you could still download it from a link pointing to their server. But eventually that was taken down as well.

I am not sure why they would want to delete your posts, unless you referred to something that could land them in trouble with the ODA.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel on July 21, 2009 at 6:21pm

Ah, very interesting, In that case I wonder what IRX will look like (if its ever released). Maybe a two part SDK.

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Permalink Reply by Deelip Menezes on July 21, 2009 at 6:42pm

From what I understand, IRX (like BRX from Bricsys) will sit on top of the ODA's DRX SDK. That is perfectly fine with the ODA. I believe ZWCAD were doing something different. They were taking the ODA's DRX SDK, modifying it to suit their needs and then distributing the modified headers and libs while still calling it DRX. In effect they created another flavor of the DRX SDK. Quite similar to how the ITC members made different flavors of IntelliCAD and messed up the whole thing for us third party developers.

ZWCAD had asked me to use their flavor of the DRX SDK to build DRX plug-ins for ZWCAD. I refused. If they want to mess up the ODA's DRX SDK, just like how they messed up the IntelliCAD 6 code, that's their problem and I do not want anything to do with it.

I have decided to use only the ODA's DRX SDK to build DRX plug-ins. If my DRX DLL's work with a particular DWGdirect hosted application, well and good. If not, then the developer of that DWGdirect hosted application can take a hike.

For example, my Bricscad plug-ins are built using the ODA's DRX SDK only and they work perfectly fine in Bricscad 8 and 9. I have not used any headers/libraries that belong to Bricsys.

Frankly speaking, going from past experience, I don't trust these ITC members to do the right thing. They messed up the IntelliCAD 6 code and they will most probably mess up the IntelliCAD 7 code as well. And while they are at it, they may create different flavors of the ODA's DRX SDK, unless the ODA puts it foot down. I sure hope they do.

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