WSCAD: a collaborative CAD system based on Web service

The rapid development of communication and computer network technology provides a solid ground for computer supported collaborative design. This work presents a distributed collaborative CAD system based on Web service. The system employs feature as its collaborative design element and uses XML to define feature operations and communication protocol between the server and the client. The system updates the feature information on the client incrementally in order to reduce network load and increase response ability. As it is constructed with Web service, the system supports collaboratively designing on heterogeneous platforms. The framework and communication protocols of it are analyzed in detail. The experimental results from the developed prototype system show that, the system is able to effectively support collaborative design under the distributed environment.