Ten questions that arose in designing the Djinn API for solid modelling
Adrian Bowyer, Stephen Cameron, Graham E. M. Jared, R. R. Martin, Alan E. Middleditch, Malcolm A. Sabin, John Woodwark · 2002
Djinn is an API for solid modelling which is defined in the language of point-sets and is thus independent of any particular modelling data-structure (e.g. boundary representations or CSG trees). In designing this API, several significant and interesting questions have arisen, including: the basic feasibility of the approach; deciding how to support cellular models; providing facilities for navigation without traditional data-structures; addressing the problems of 'tweaks' and blends; ensuring that labels are preserved under geometric operations; permitting regions in which changes to a model have taken place to be identified; coping with approximate models; deciding whether to support variational models; keeping sweeps and transforms within a reasonable domain; and providing facilities to handle the many types of parametric surface. These questions are not all fully answered, but progress continues towards a published interface and C++ language binding.