ANOTHER CHOICE FOR PRO/E PROGRAMMING.

Back in October 1998, we wrote about Rand Technologies's Automation Gateway, an alternative to Parametric Technology's Application Programming Toolkit that employs Visual Basic instead of the C language. Since then, we received an e--mail from aCATec GmbH, a German company with yet another application development tool for Pro/Engineer. In lieu of Visual Basic, aCATec's Power/Pro--Link employs what it calls a "scripting language" based on Tcl/Tk. This language was originally developed by John Ousterhout at the University of California, Berkeley, to control electronic design automation software. (Tcl stands for "Tool Control Language" and Tk is an extension that can be used to assemble components into graphical user interfaces.) Sun Microsystems hired Ousterhout to continue development of Tcl/Tk and began promoting it as a tool for cobbling together applications that run on Macintosh and Windows systems as well as Unix computers. Like Visual Basic, Tcl/Tk scripts are interpreted, so there is no need to compile and link them before testing a program. Power/Pro--Link employs the same grammar and syntax as Tcl/Tk and supplements the standard commands with more than 250 that are specific to Pro/Engineer. The aCATec Web site gives five examples of Pro/E utilities that have been written with Power/Pro--Link including simulation of a cam and a browser that lets Pro/E users view images of files before loading them. Representatives of aCATec claim that automation programs can be written with its language much faster and with fewer lines of code than with Pro/E's APT or the Visual Basic language employed by Rand's Automation Gateway. Unlike Visual Basic, Power/Pro--Link works with both Unix and Windows systems. In the U.S., a Power/Pro--Link development license sells for $5,900. Run--time licenses sell for $950 each and site licenses cost $29,000. All license fees include six months of maintenance and support. Annual maintenance costs 12 percent of the initial license fee. Power/Pro--Link requires, at a minimum, the Pro/Engineer Foundation software which costs $5,995. If your company's CAD support engineers are familiar with Tcl/Tk or if they are not well versed in Visual Basic, Power/Pro--Link might be an attractive alternative to Rand's Automation Gateway. Contact: Henning Bitter, aCATec GmbH, Am Spehrteich 12, 30989 Gehrden, Germany Telephone: [phone] FAX: [phone] e--mail: [e-mail]. Web site: http://www.acatec.de. Incidentally, the Web site is in both English and German. Select the Union Jack for the English version. In the U.S., aCATec is represented exclusively by Softech, Inc. which provides both consulting and design services for companies that use Pro/Engineer. Contact: David Bigelow, director of consulting, Softech, Inc., 6666 East 75th Street, Suite #410, Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 Telephone: [phone] FAX: [phone] e--mail: [e-mail]. For information about learning Tcl/Tk, see the Web site: http://www.scriptics.com.