SFERE, or OSM as its working-title was, is a graphic shell for PROFAN, a commandline operated, structural analysis program based on ICES STRUDL.

   splash screen

PROFAN was the core processing engine used in the research into the 'Bollen-model', a calculation model for simulating the cracking of concrete when it's under pressure. The 'Bollen-model' was developed by the department for mechanics in buildings of the Delft Faculty of Architecture, and originally consisted of a large collection of small command-line tools.

The original goal of SFERE was to make the model more accessible for other researchers by combining all the commandline tools into a single GUI, sadly this goal was never reached [due to lack of funding].
SFERE had some excellent visualisation and editing features for the time, but they were quickly outdated due to the advent of the powerful graphic interfaces of the newer Windows operating systems.

   the interface

PROFAN did not function well under Win31, so the bulk of the work consisted of setting up a basic graphic user interface under DOS.

The resulting framework had some nice features for a DOS-based GUI.

• Modular OO Core
• Multitasking; using a simple, but adequate daisy-chain.
• Optimized graphic/mouse/font routines for the 16 color(!) display.

   the font editor

This project was the first modular OO framework I built; The power of this type of development becomes quite apparent when you start building tools within the framework, to help develop the framework itself [the font editor being a nice example of this].

The generic GUI framework concept was continued, and developed further, in the aptly named sfere2 [sfere btw is not misspelled, it is an acronym for Structural Finite Element Research Environment].
In turn, Sfere2's framework concepts are continued in the cornerstone project.