Company: OBERMEYER Group
Products used: Oxygene
Project: Internal-use CAD plugins

Overview

OBERMEYER Group is one of Germany’s largest independent engineering consultancies, delivering integrated solutions for infrastructure, transportation, and environmental projects. To support its complex workflows in infrastructure planning, OBERMEYER relies heavily on industry-leading software platforms like Autodesk’s AutoCAD and Revit. However, to fully meet the company’s high standards and internal requirements, off-the-shelf software is not always enough. That’s where Oxygene language comes into play.

The Challenge

Before adopting RemObjects Oxygene, the team experimented with traditional .NET development tools, particularly C#. However, developers with deep expertise in Delphi found C# to be more time-consuming and cumbersome.

Another challenge was reusing legacy code. And Oxygene now gives them the opportunity to port the function library, which was built up over decades, and use it in .NET.

Goals and Requirements

• Seamless integration with the .NET-based APIs of modern Autodesk products
• Ability to reuse legacy Delphi code
• Improved developer efficiency and maintainability
• Reliable support and future-proof language development

“I had high expectations when switching to Oxygene. So far, these have been met without any problems.” - Manfred Fuchs, OBERMEYER Group

The Solution

Previously, plugins for AutoCAD and Revit had been written in C++, but as the .NET APIs for these platforms matured, it made sense to move to a more modern setup. Oxygene made this transition smoother, offering a way to fully adopt .NET while still building on past development experience.

Today, the team uses Oxygene to develop plugins for their CAD systems. Delphi is still used for other internal tools, while Python, JavaScript, and Lua are occasionally employed for scripting or automation. The current setup has proven stable and efficient, with all plugins performing reliably in day-to-day use.

Filer is a file manager in AutoCAD with a much wider range of functions than the original one available in AutoCAD. It also has a built-in JavaScript interpreter so that it can be adapted to project-specific requirements.

MultiTool is a tool for selecting geometry in AutoCAD using various filter criteria and then modifying it. The filter results can also be linked using Boolean operations (and, or, xor, etc.). Additionally, a Lua interpreter is built in for even more specialized filter operations.