PLM World NX Programming Special Interest Group

Submitted by richotchkiss on Mon, 04/06/2015 - 17:15
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General Discussion

For those of you who are not aware. The PLM World organization had been supporting a special interest group focused on NX automation programming. I was briefly recently the chairman of the group. There has been a lot of reorganization going on with respect to the focus and special interest groups. The PLM World organization is eliminating the SIGs and replacing them with what they are calling Working Groups. I am interested in continuing the Programming group in the new form. The main difference between the old SIGs and the new Working Groups is that PLM World wants the purpose of each group to be more focused and potentially temporary to solve a fairly specific goal in a given timeframe. Groups may disband after the problem is solved (or if no progress is made) or just refocus on a new topic. What I am looking for is some topics that people would be interested in focusing on. Here is a topic that was suggested by the Working Group committee
1. Compile a formal document describing the various NX automation tools. Including.
a. What automation tools are available
b. What are the pros and cons of each tool
c. Which tool is the best to use for what condition.
Anyone have other suggestions?

Thanks,

P.S. If you are interested in joining the group, let me know.

Ric Hotchkiss
Applications Consultant
rhotchkiss@daasolutions.com

ciao - Mon, 04/06/2015 - 21:15

The "Working Group" idea seems ill-conceived, to me. Having transient groups focussed on specific short-term problems prevents the formation of a "community" of people with shared interests.

So, to continue as a "SIG", I suppose what we need is a never-ending sequence of topics/issues/goals that a core group of people want to work on. I don't think the "compendium of tools" topic is a very interesting one, personally. All the programming tools have roughly the same capabilities, and the best one to use is typically the one you're already familiar with.

Some topics that interest me are:

(1) The Economics of Programming: What are the economics of programming? How do you justify doing it, from a business point of view? How do you respond to management folks who say things like "our business is building cars/planes/widgets, not writing code". How do you estimate ROI? How do you justify expenditures on tools or training?

(2) Programming for the Rest of Us: How do you get the average designer/engineer interested in programming? How do you explain the benefits? How do you convince him/her that it's not all that difficult? What are some effective methods of evangelism and training?

(3) Code As Knowledge: What is the role of programming in capturing process knowledge? A Design Handbook can explain how you should do some engineering task. But a program is even better -- it can lead you through the process, and even do some of the tasks for you. Is writing the program code any harder than writing the Design Handbook? Is it any more difficult to maintain as time goes by? Back to ROI; topic #1.

(4) Non-Vanilla Tools: Current NX tools are (for the most part) based on plain vanilla programming technology -- C/C++, .NET, Java, Python, etc. But the most successful tool was probably GRIP, and this wasn't vanilla technology, it was a special proprietray language. So, would something other than a general-purpose programming language be better, maybe? How about driving NX from Mathematica, or Maple, or Matlab, or Excel, or whatever? How about a DSL (Domain-Specific Language)?

(5) Programming Across Products: How can we write code that works with NX and Teamcenter and maybe even other (Siemens) products, too? Seems like we have to learn several different tool-sets. Maybe we need a general programming SIG, not an NX Programming SIG. Is there a TC programming SIG ??

JXB - Tue, 04/07/2015 - 05:41

to all

I believe there should be a genuine effort to produce an help manual that is worth it's salt. As a non programmer I found very poor (and I am being polite). All the bits of code I have written a for repetitve tasks and without the help from individuals on tis user group I would have given up

One should also be looking at the licensing issue. It's beyond me as to why one needs a specific licence to create GUI with the UI styler

regard

jxb

Thanks
Regards