AU2016: Autodesk Forge DevDays

I’m at AU2016 this week. Yesterday, I had a chance to attend Autodesk Forge Dev Day. It is a  gathering of several hundred people – mostly developers and partners of Autodesk together with Autodesk Partnership team lead by Autodesk Senior Director Jim Quanci. You might know this as ADN team (Autodesk Developer Network).

Autodeks Forge is a platform, API and investment fund by Autodesk. Read more about it here (). In my blogs earlier this year from first Forge DevCon in San Francisco, I shared information about Autodesk plans for Forge – Autodesk Forge: Distributed Design Data Platform and Autodesk Forge: Reinventing AutoCAD platform?

I captured few slides during yesterday presentations that I want to share with you. These slides will give you an idea about what Autodesk Forge status today and about next development steps of Autodesk Forge API. I’ve been trying to focus mostly on topics related to data management, PDM and PLM development.

First of all, you notice – it is all about data. Forge API is about to centralize access to design data information produced by Autodesk CAD systems and also by other CAD vendors.

Forge API provides bunch of different APIs focusing on a different domains – data management, model derivative, viewer and others. As you can see Forge API is a way to get data for other Autodesk product as well as to partner and custom applications.

Model derivative service – this is a set of API most of PDM/ PLM developers might be interested in. You get an access to design information and related metadata.

Data management API is an entry point into Forge Design platform. It gives you access to general set of information – user, projects, etc.

Forge is not limited to Autodesk data.

What is my conclusion? Forge API is a modern approach to provide micro-services and REST API infrastructure to developers interested to interact with the data produced by Autodesk products. Forge API is not limited to Autodesk and also can support other CAD systems. If you’re developing cloud applications and your customers are using Autodesk CAD product, this is something you want to explore these days. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.