Re: RV: Ref : Ingenio La Corona - Dia and AddFlow 5

[Hans Breuer <hans breuer org>]

Hi,
sorry I'm not sure what you are asking for. At least I did not find any 
questions. So I'm trying to understand the system you describe and respond 
with general technology/license constraints/mismatches.

At 06.11.2011 12:30, Silvio Peluffo wrote:
[...]
>                                                               My name is
> Silvio Peluffo, Chemical Engineer, Plant Manager in Ingenio La Corona,
> Tucumán, Argentina. In my free time my work is a developing a simulator for
> the sugar industry. This work is my hobby, that is what I do because I like
> and in my spare time. I am not an expert programmer and at my age, 64 years,
> is difficult , in  free time, to learn or migrate to another more modern
> language that Visual Basic 6 wich I use today.
Dia is developed as cross-platform application working on Linux and Windows 
with only very few platform specific code.
It is mainly implemented in C with the ability to write plug-ins in Python.

Visual Basic is AFAICT only commercially available and basically limited to 
Windows platform.
> My simulator use to generate
> a flowsheet, a designated commercial ActiveX, AddFlow 5.
Active X is only available on Windows, but even there embedding Active X 
controls into Dia would be techically extremly hard and probably not 
compatible with Dia's licence. Dia is free and open source software under 
GPL. It might be possible though to reimplement the diagram part 
"flowsheet" based on Dia's standard functionality.

> This Active X
> allows me to merge sequentially the different operating units that make up
> the production process in the sugar industry. Each operating unit is
> resolved in another Active X, a spreadsheet showing the input and output
> streams that make up the mass and energy balance.
There is no spreadsheet functionality available with Dia. There might be 
something in http://git.gnome.org/browse/goffice/ which could be used but 
again it would involve development in C.

> This simulator works by
> taking information on how to operatively connect the various operating units
> in the flowsheet, and each is resolved in each spreadsheet, data from each
> flow stream to the next unit operation. The process is solved iteratively
> until convergence. As the Active X AddFlow 5 is commercial, seeking to find
> Dia, which works similarly to the creation of the flowsheet.
If I understand correctly the simulator is written as Visual Basic 
application and using two Active X components.

Dia itself is not develop as reuseable component but is a full application, 
which can be extended with plug-ins. It might be possible to reimplement 
your simulator as Dia plug-in, but not in Visual Basic.

> I am very
> interested to see the possibility of changing AddFlow 5 per Dia, but if you
> cannot access the source code from VB 6 for each current direction of flow
> in each operating unit.
So you would want to replace one Active X but not the other? And keep your 
application while reusing Dia as diagram component?

Sorry, that does not look feasible to me. Of course given that Dia is open 
source you could reuse as much of it's code as you want, if you adhere to 
the licence terms. Using GPL source code requires to make everything using 
it also GPL.

Regards,
        Hans

-------- Hans "at" Breuer "dot" Org -----------
Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to
get along without it.                -- Dilbert