Object-oriented application development in CAD: a graduate course

The programming languages typically offered by CAD systems for third-party application developers were procedural or functional. A major shift is currently occurring in that new versions of commercial CAD software will support object-oriented programming languages for application development. Developers who wish to take advantage of this new kind of environment must undergo a considerable cognitive “retooling” and adopt new software engineering strategies. We describe a graduate course that aims at introducing students to effective object-oriented development strategies, especially use case-driven development and the tools provided by the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Students gained experience with these tools by forming, together with the instructors, a single development team writing an application on top of MicroStation/J using JMDL as programming language. The paper describes the instructors' experience with this approach.