blue project
============

The blue project consists of two main components:

  1) The blue library
  2) The blue command line utilities


The blue library
----------------

The blue library is a collection of functions to assist in the automation of
engineering and mechanical drawings.  The blue library maintains the state of
a drawing, allowing for additions, deletions, and changes to made to that
drawing.  The drawing can be saved persistently in a structured XML format,
and restored from that same format.

The blue library is a C language library that is intended to be used for custom
user applications as well as the library used by the blue command line
utilities.  Also, the blue C library can be incorporated into other popular
languages such as Python, Ruby, PERL, JAVA, etc.  While blue library is coded
purely in C, the design of the library uses many object oriented concepts, and
therefore should not be too difficult to be wrapped as an object oriented library into other languages.  

Since the blue storage format is XML, the conversion to and from other
popular and standard drawing formats should be mostly straightforward.  These
conversions may be accomplished by dedicated translation libraries and
utilities, or by using generic methods such as XML transforms.

The blue command line utilities
-------------------------------

The blue command line utilities are a collection of commands that allow a
user to create, edit and manage a blue drawing from the command line.
Individual commands exist for each blue drawing component and are intended
to be used in the same hierachical fashion as the blue library itself.  The
commands accept options to create and edit each component configuration
element.  Also, the commands accept blueXML format input and produce blueXML
output.

The blue commands are somewhat unique in that they can accept STDIO input and
produce STDIO output using a sieve filtering technique.  The sieve filtering
technique allows blue commands to be used in sophisticated command pipelines
that can produce a complete blue drawing, including collecting multiple drawing
components into larger container drawing components.  For instance, a drawing
layer can contain many components, such as text and lines.  Many text and line
components can be fed to the command for a blue layer and collected by that
blue layer, producing a blue layer that contains the text and lines.  This
layer would then be output in blueXML format.  Entire drawings can be built up
from the command line using standard scripting techniques.

The blue library is used by the blue command line utilities and possibly
other applications.

Also, a complete set of user guide, tutorial, manpages, and reference manual
can be built and installed from these sources.