BRL-CAD's core C++ interface

This page contains the design document for an enhancement or feature. The design should be considered a work in progress and may not represent the final design. As this is a collaborative design, contributions and participation from other developers and users is encouraged. Use the discussion page for providing comments and suggestions.

Application Domain

The C++ interface is a object oriented API to BRL-CAD's core libraries around librt. The target group are developers of applications which use BRL-CAD as module.

Furthermore, this interface should be a good reference to the use of BRL-CAD's standard C interface.

Requirements

The interface should be self-contained

I.e. source code using this interface should not need to include any other BRL-CAD header file (nor TCL, openNURBS, ...).

As a consequence the interface will hide implementation details. Therefore the implementation can be changed without affecting an application using this interface.

Main Classes

ConstDatabase

The ConstDatabase class provides a handle to read-only database content.

If it is associated with a file the file will be opened read-only. I.e. multiple instances of this class can refer to the same file.

Database

The Database class is a virtual class which declares a handle to a writable database. It is derived from ConstDatabase and expanded by methods to modify the database's content.

FileDatabase

The FileDatabase class provides a handle to writable file-based database derived from Database.

MemoryDatabase

The MemoryDatabase class provides a handle to writable in-memory database derived from Database.

Object

The Object class is the base class of all database objects (e.g. primitives etc.).

Examples

• A kind of "Hallo World" program