ABSTRACT
The area of application programming within the Engineering field have always had to fight to overcome many obstacles, mainly created by the vendors of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) packages. The greatest of these barriers was the vendors insistence on using dissimilar information structures to store and transfer their data. This has meant that any application programmer who wanted
to use any information created by a CAE package has had to work closely with the vendor to know how the information was stored, and how to access this data.
