STEP Tools Weekly Newsletter for November 2, 1998

[Martin Hardwick]

This weekly newsletter is a brief update of what is going on in STEP
and at STEP Tools, Inc.  If you want to know more, try the STEP Tools
web site (http://www.steptools.com) or the contact for each article.

--------------------
CADKEY Beta Testing ST-ACIS for release to 250,000 Customers

Baystate Technologies will soon make an STEP translator written
using the ST-ACIS library available to its 250,000 customers as
part of CADKEY 98. For more information see:

	http://www.cadkey.com (=> products => CADKEY 98)

CADKEY will join IRONCAD (http://www.ironcad.com) as one of the
leading companies making STEP available to the supply chain.  Together
with Newport News, Hitachi Zosen and others, they are finding the 
ST-ACIS Library to be an effective, accurate tool for programming
solid model translations.

--------------------
More Acccurate Reporting for the Translation Service

Each week we give a report on the success of our translation service.
Many of you have been reading this report and some of you have been
questioning the reported success rate. Therefore, we did an analysis
and found the following:

1. There was a bug in the reporting system that caused every
   call to the EXPRESS compiler to be registered as a failure. 
2. Sometimes people try to trick a translator by giving
   it a bad file on purpose (e.g. asking the ACIS translator
   to translate an EXPRESS file)
3. We were not making any distinction between mature tools such
   as the ACIS translator that rarely fail, and new tools such as
   the new St-WebExchange Visualization system which fail quite
   often.

In this weeks reports and subsequent weeks you will see two
corrections.  First, we have corrected the reporting for EXPRESS
compilations which raises the total success rate from 68% to 88%
Second we have begun to report each tool individually so that you can
distinguish between the mature tools and the new ones and watch the
new ones become mature in the upcoming weeks.

--------------------
Application Programming with STEP

Our next class is on application programming with STEP. It will be
held from November 17 to November 19 in Troy. In hands-on sessions and
lectures the class describes how to write STEP translators for CAD,
CAM, CAE and PDM applications.

    http://www.steptools.com/training/apstep.html

--------------------
Translation Service Statistics

Summary:
Period Covered: Sun Oct 25 03:25:03 1998 -- Sun Nov  1 03:25:03 1998
Total usage: 87
Successful usage: 83 (95%)
Errors: 4 (4%)

Translator	total	errors	success rate

acis-ap203	22	0	100%
ap203-acis	6	0	100%
ap203-vrml	3	2	33%
ap203-xml	1	0	100%
ap203check	8	0	100%
expfront2	1	0	100%
express2html	34	0	100%
gifviz		8	1	87%
steptoimage	4	1	75%

=======================================
All-Time stats

Summary:
Period Covered: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1997- Sun Nov  1 03:25:10 1998
Total usage: 1803
Successful usage: 1594 (88%)
Errors: 209 (11%)

Translator	total	errors	success rate

acis-ap203	396	15	96%
ap203-acis	628	55	91%
ap203-stl	42	14	66%
ap203-vrml	241	63	73%
ap203-xml	31	5	83%
ap203check	19	2	89%
expfront	124	17	86%
expfront2	3	0	100%
express2html	148	0	100%
expxfront	11	1	90%
gifviz		14	6	57%  
iges-ap202	10	0	100%
ap203-xml	13	2	84%
steptoimage	123	29	76%

--------------------
Our Tools

For more information on classes, consulting and any of these tools
contact info at steptools.com. 

Programming:
* ST-Developer -- programming tools for writing standard product data 
  applications, databases, interfaces and translators.

* ST-ORACLE -- SQL programming tool for moving standard product data
  into and out of ORACLE databases. 

* ST-ObjectStore -- ObjectStore binding of ST-Developer for moving
  standard product data into and out of ObjectStore databases.

* ST-PowerModel -- programming tools for moving standard product data
  into and out of PowerModel databases.

* ST-WebDeveloper -- XML, JAVA, GIF and HTML programming tools for
  managing standard product data on the Internet.

* ST-ACIS Library -- programming functions to convert standard product
  data to and from ACIS models and SAT files.

Desktop:
* ST-EXPRESS -- desktop tool to visualize product data schemas.

* ST-ACIS Translator -- desktop tool for translating standard
  product data to ACIS and vice versa.

* ST-Visualizer -- desktop tool to view, analyze and check the
  accuracy of standard product databases.

Data Exchange:
* ST-WebExchange -- World Wide Web translation and visualization
  services for sharing standard product data with customers and
  suppliers.


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