AU2017 Forge DevCon – Collaborative Future and Evolution of Development Tools

I spent my yesterday morning at AU2017 Forge Developer conference. I featured keynotes in my previous article. So, today I wanted to publish my notes and few pictures I captured.

DevCon keynotes session was open by Jim Quanci, Senior Director of Forge Partnership

Autodesk is actively developing Forge platform to provide support for existing applications and empower new integration. Here are few interesting features and functions shared by Brian Roepke, Senior Director of Forge Product Management.

Forge support for Webhooks API. It was an important missing point in Forge API until now. Delivery of Webhook API can close many gaps in existing development scenarios in Forge platform.

Another interesting enhancement is Inventor and Revit automation API. It will improve Forge platform connection to existing desktop products and CAD files.

For Autodesk Forge developers future looks collaborative to support infrastructure to develop products enabling communication and collaboration between engineers, customers, manufacturers, contractors and customers.

This picture is capturing high level component views of Autodesk Forge. Not much new was shared about the technology of high frequency data, which will be supporting real time collaboration in web applications.

Autodesk presented an interesting video of Forge Development environment. As much as I was able to understand, Forge Dev environment will help to partners to build an entire application in the environment highly connected to all available Autodesk Forge components.

What is my conclusion? Autodesk Forge platform is maturing. New features and APIs are going to be introduced and new tools will be developed. Existing tools such as Viewer will be enhanced. The question I didn’t find answer on was related to how Autodesk Forge platform will support mixed rich client and web based environment. It is not clear that one of the options will be preferred. It is hard to believe somebody can build tools without web platform and APIs. At the same time, it is not clear how existing rich client tools will be merged into this future web environment. It is related to both desktop and web versions of Fusion360 as well as corresponded APIs and tools. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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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.