STEP Tools News for Friday October 13

[Martin Hardwick]

This 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). I hope to see you all in the
ISO meeting in Charleston next week. There will be lots of 
presentations and events related to XML and STEP-NC.


-------------
AP-210 Viewer

AP-210 is the STEP Application Protocol for printed circuit boards and
printed circuit board assemblies. It is one of a number of Application
Protocols that will become full international standards at the end of
this year or early next year.

We have updated the ST-Viewer so that it can be used to view AP-210
files. The implementation required us to extend the viewer for the 2D
extrusions used by AP-210 to model a board and surface components.

ST-Viewer customers can access the new viewer on our home page. The
viewer also contains the AP-227 (process plant) enhancements announced
in a previous newsletter plus some spline facetting enhancements that
allow the viewer to view high order splines (such as those produced by
CATIA) more rapidly.


--------
XML Data

We have put sample data sets for the Object Serialization Early
Binding and the Containment Early Binding onto our STEP-XML page. The
sample data sets show that the OSEB is more concise than the CEB but
the CEB is much more descriptive.

The example data is our test file for STEP-NC.

	http://www.steptools.com/projects/xml/


-----------
Short Names

We have taken over the short name server from NIST. The short name
server is used to define short name equivalents for the entity names
in a STEP standard. These names can be useful for application systems
that have limits on the the sizes of identifiers such as some database
systems.

The new short name server is indexed by schema.

In the future we plan to add a short name generator to the EXPRESS
compiler on our translation service so that STEP developers can get a
sample of the short names that will be used for their new schemas.

The server can be accessed from our home page

	http://www.steptools.com


-------------------
Translation Service

Summary:
Period Covered: Sun Oct  1 03:25:02 2000 -- Sun Oct  8 03:25:02 2000
Total usage: 57
Successful usage: 52 (91%)
Errors: 5 (8%)


Translator			total	error	success rate

ACIS to STEP:		15	0	100%
STEP to ACIS:		19	0	100%
AP203 Checker:		3	0	100%
Parasolid to STEP:	6	1	83%
STEP to Parasolid:	5	3	40%
STEP to XML:		1	0	100%
Visualization tools:	4	1	75%
Visualization Service:	3	0	100%

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

------------------------------------
Summary:
Period Covered: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 -- Sun Oct  8 03:25:37 2000
Total usage: 10528
Successful usage: 9315 (88%)
Errors: 1213 (11%)


Translator			total	error	success rate

ACIS to STEP:		2458	55	97%
STEP to ACIS:		3407	248	92%
STEP to XML:		87	18	79%
AP203 Checker:		676	48	92%
EXPRESS Checker:		11	1	90%
Parasolid to STEP:	404	121	70%
STEP to Parasolid:	468	136	70%
STEP to XML:		404	30	92%
Visualization tools:	551	146	73%
Visualization Service:	117	18	84%
XML to STEP:		97	21	78%


---------------------------
Tools From STEP Tools, Inc.

The world's foremost firms use the STEP Tools product line to
help them share engineering product information.  Over one
million people use product data applications built with
ST-Developer, the company's flagship product.  In response to
this international popularity, ST-Repository is a database for
e-manufacturing developed for the growing number of mid-sized to
large corporations that need to share design and manufacturing
information on the Internet.

Database Tools:
* ST-Repository -- Global teaming database for design and
  manufacturing projects with services for Internet Translation,
  Universal Visualization and Enterprise Integration.

Programming Tools:
* ST-Developer -- programming tools for writing STEP
  applications, translators and databases.

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

* ST-Parasolid Library -- programming functions to convert STEP
  data to and from Parasolid models.

Desktop Tools:
* ST-ACIS Translator -- desktop tool for translating STEP data to
  ACIS and vice versa.

* ST-Parasolid Translator -- desktop tool for translating STEP
  data to Parasolid and vice versa.

* ST-Viewer -- desktop tool to view, analyze and check the
  accuracy of STEP data.


== ST-Announce Administrative Notes ==================================
To be removed from this mailing list, send mail to majordomo at steptools.com
with the line "unsubscribe st-announce" as the body of the message.  To be
added to this list, send mail with the body "subscribe st-announce"
-
Short news items can be submitted to st-announce-owner for inclusion in
the next STEP Tools newsletter.  Other questions or requests can be sent
to info at steptools.com.