Bricsys's Mission-Critical CAD Tools | Built With Qt (original) (raw)
Dedicated to Building Cost-Effective and Mission-Critical CAD Tools
2002
The development of BricsCAD begins
1200+
Registered application developers worldwide
The industry standard in 2D and 3D design modeling
Bricsys is a global provider of the BricsCAD® brand of engineering design software. BricsCAD is a cross-platform application offering the best 2D and 3D CAD software with powerful tools for architects, engineers, and designers.
CAD (which stands for Computer-aided design) is a way to mock up designs in both 2D and 3D simulations, which allows for such designs to be fully visualized in a variety of environments. Among others, CAD is most used by architects, engineers, and construction workers.
The benefits of using CAD software include the automation of the manual drafting process with highly productive digital tools, artificial intelligence and machine learning. This enables the users to create more efficient modeling & documentation workflows. This saves development time, reduces mistakes, and improves the overall quality of design projects.
Bricsys is a part of Hexagon AB, and headquartered in Ghent, Belgium.
Read more about developing with Qt for desktop and mobile
Bricsys QtWS22 Presentation
Sander Valcke, UI Team Tech Lead, discusses Bricsys's switch to Qt.
With initial estimates of complete conversion totaling 50 dev-years of work, it was clear that this is was undertaking of epic proportions, spanning multiple actual years and a number of releases. This talk will focus on the high-level architecture of the qt/qml integration.
“We wanted a better-looking and functioning UI, and we wanted it developed faster – with Qt, we could have our cake and eat it too.”
Sander Valcke
UI Team Tech Lead, Bricsys
Safety and higher performance through 360-degree visualization
Bricsys made the decision to switch to Qt several years ago, and despite the initial work, cost of setting up & converting their existing UI frameworks, they feel the decision was the right one.
Among the pros of using Qt as their framework, they list:
- Using QML for UI development – fast & high quality
- Pixel-perfect reproduction of designs – something prior frameworks were not able to deliver
- A truly cross-platform framework – now Bricsys don't need to deploy separate support teams for each platform, but any issues that may arise can be simultaneously fixed for all platforms
- A possible avenue towards expanding to WebAssembly – an option they wanted to keep open
- Excellent documentation – some of the best they've worked with
- Commercial support – top notch quality & speed whenever required
BricsCAD Specs:
- Cmake/C++17 aiming to switch to C++20 soon
- Currently on Qt 5.15.11, but hoping to migrate to Qt 6.x before next major release in October 2023
- No custom Qt build, using official libraries
- wxWidgets (Linux / Mac)
- wxWidgets + MFC (Windows)
- Extensive third-party API that people can use to build applications on top of BricsCAD
“The commercial support we receive from Qt is top notch, both in terms of speed and quality of advice.”
Sander Valcke
UI Team Tech Lead, Bricsys
Bricsys is a global provider of the BricsCAD® brand of engineering design software. For the last two decades, its singular focus has been building cost-effective, mission-critical CAD tools.
Now, as a part of the global technology giant Hexagon AB, Bricsys is reinforcing its commitment to take design workflows to the next level.