It is Alive in the Lab

Cloud Services You Need

[This is Ben Cochran again writing for Scott while he is on Sabbatical.]

For years now, languages, tools and platforms have been making the creation of web-based services easier and more robust. Some of these are IIS, Apache, Tomcat, Java, .NET, WCF, PHP, Ruby on Rails and the list goes on and on and … 

Until recently deploying and hosting these services had been difficult and expensive. This is because any service of value needs to be dependable.  Otherwise, who would use it? I personally have come to expect web services to be highly available. For example, I love on-line banking, but if my bank had flaky on-line services, I would change banks without thinking twice. Thankfully, that is not the case for my bank.

Cloud based services are generally a collection of connected dependent systems that include storage, databases, security, auditing, monitoring and more. The whole system is only as reliable as the weakest link. Traditionally, making these services reliable required lots and lots of hardware. Each server needs to have redundant power supplies, redundant disks, redundant network, redundant load balancers and redundant storage. Then the data-center that houses all this equipment needs to be redundant. Does this sound a little redundant?  With all this equipment, hardware failure is inevitable, requiring teams of IT people to keep everything running smoothly.

The result is that many companies think twice about building scalable reliable services. Companies that do have the needed IT infrastructure are often times not flexible enough to try out new ideas. They require a retooling to support different and out of the box services.  All of this makes the cost of exploring new web based services expensive and risky, for many too risky to try the next crazy idea.

This is changing! With cloud hosting services from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing the backend systems on an as-needed bases the initial cost is a fraction of what it was. For example, servers, load balancers, network, reliable backed up storage and databases are rented by the hour or gigabyte. Instead of buying truckloads of expensive redundant hardware in hopes that a new cloud service idea is successful, companies can spend almost nothing to try out new ideas. If the new idea takes off, the backend systems scales up for the demand. Companies need only pay for resources that are actually used.

Labs had been experimenting with new and interesting cloud services like:
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/dragonfly/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/draw/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/freewheel/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/showroom/
and more recently http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/trials/

What new cloud services are useful to you?  What are your crazy ideas?

- Ben Cochran

Autodesk Single Sign-On System Maintenance

Project Draw, Project Freewheel, Project Showroom, and Project Twitch rely on the Autodesk Single Sign-on login. This provides the convenience of having one user name and password for all things Autodesk. The other side of the coin is that when the Single Sign-on login is down, capabilities on these Labs services are reduced.

1. You cannot save your diagrams on Project Draw.
2. You can view your designs on Project Freewheel but cannot upload or delete designs.
3. You cannot save rooms on Project Showroom.
4. You cannot evaluate AutoCAD, Inventor, or Revit using the internet via Project Twitch.

The scheduled maintenance window will last until Sunday at 8:00 PM Pacific time. Enjoy your weekend. Read a book.

Updated Autodesk Freewheel Service Now Available

Recall that version 1.0 of Autodesk Freewheel was fully released as an Autodesk service on April 10, 2007. Project Freewheel continued its technology preview path by extending its capabilities. On July 20, 2009 Autodesk Freewheel was updated to include elements from Project Freewheel based on your feedback.

Item
Name	Project Freewheel®	Autodesk® Freewheel®
URL	freewheel.labs.autodesk.com	freewheel.autodesk.com
Version	1.0.9.59	1.0.10.60
Strategy	exposure of viewing and other technologies that may or may not eventually be incorporated into Autodesk® Freewheel®	reliable DWF-based viewing without the need to install additional software
Monitoring	monitored by the Autodesk Labs team	monitored 24/7 by the same Autodesk IT Operations team that maintains the Buzzsaw/Streamline servers
Emphasis	exploration of sharing design data over the web to a variety of platforms	software as a service - in this case, a free service
Features	Upload via ShareNow, File Open (DWF, DWFx), Email, Print, consolidated login, My Designs, My Sessions, Zoom (In, Out, Fit), Pan, Full Screen/Restore, 3D Orbit, Navigation Wheels (3D and 2D), Collaboration (Share, Join, Markup List) Markup (Sketch, Highlight, Callout), DIV-based mashup, watermark, Customize UI (mode, CSS, UI, TOOL), JavaScript API, Project Draw integration	File Open (DWF, DWFx), Email, Print,  Zoom (In, Out, Fit), Pan, Full Screen/Restore, 3D Orbit, Navigation Wheels (3D and 2D), DIV-based mashup, watermark, Customize UI (mode, CSS, UI, TOOL), JavaScript API
Support	Autodesk Labs Project Freewheel® email address Labs.Freewheel@autodesk.com or Freewheel® discussion group http://discussion.autodesk.com/ forum.jspa?forumID=251 or news://discussion.autodesk.com/ autodesk.freewheel	Freewheel® discussion group http://discussion.autodesk.com/ forum.jspa?forumID=251 or news://discussion.autodesk.com/ autodesk.freewheel
Blog	It's Alive in the Lab http://labs.blogs.com Scott Sheppard	Beyond the Paper http://dwf.blogs.com Volker Joseph

Graduating functionality from our technology preview to our production service is alive in the lab.

Project Freewheel will be down on Monday from 9 AM to 12 PM

Our IT department will be performing some routine maintenance on Monday. As such, the Project Freewheel servers will be down from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific time. We thank you for your patience and your continued interest in Project Freewheel. We're always glad to hear Project Freewheel usage stores at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com.

Project Freewheel in the wild: Orion Engineering Limited

I found another example of Project Freewheel in the wild. Check out:

Orion Engineering Limited Home page

It's great to see our technoloy previews in action.

Autodesk Freewheel and Project Freewheel: Tell Us Your Stories

We are eager to listen.

Project Freewheel is our experimental version of Freewheel. We are currently using it as a means to get feedback on a software as a service based approach to collaboration. Think of it as Autodesk Design Review without the install or an Autodesk Design Review that runs on the Mac and Linux.

Autodesk Freewheel is our production version of the service. It allows you to view design data on platforms that Autodesk Design Review does not reach, i.e. Mac and Linux.

3D/2D ShareNow is a utility that allows you to share your designs using Project Freewheel with just one click. While working with your design in AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, or Design Review, you can instantly publish a DWF to Project Freewheel. Once in Project Freewheel, you can use its collaboration features for a real-time or anytime electronic review process.

With the brief Autodesk Freewheel outage last Monday, many of you were kind enough to contact us when you encountered an error. As a follow up, we'd like to hear your Freewheel stories. Are you using Autodesk Freewheel or Project Freewheel? Do you use ShareNow? Should ShareNow also publish to Autodesk Freewheel in addition to Project Freewheel? What are your thoughts? Please let us know at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com.

Listening to user input is alive in the lab.

Autodesk Freewheel is back up

Autodesk Freewheel usage remains steady - a technology you can count on.

Service for Autodesk Freewheel has been restored. Thanks for your patience and your continued use of Autodesk Freewheel.

Autodesk Freewheel is down; Project Freewheel is up

Autodesk Freewheel is down:

http://freewheel.autodesk.com/

Project Freewheel is up:

http://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com/

The Autodesk Labs team is responsible for Project Freewheel. Autodesk Freewheel is maintained by another department within the company. Thanks to everyone who alerted Autodesk Labs about Autodesk Freewheel. I am in contact with the other department regarding the situation.

How large of an image can I get using Project Freewheel?

Project Freewheel is our software as a service approach to viewing and collaboration using just a web browser. Think of it as Autodesk Design Review without the install. Or think of it as a way to view designs on the Macintosh, Linux, or cell phones. In addition to being an interactive viewer (pan, zoom, 3D orbit, etc.), Project Freewheel can be used to generate static images. The static images are just like GIFs or JPEGs that are traditionally used in conjunction with HTML. The advantage of using Project Freewheel to generate them is that when the design is updated, the image is regenerated. This allows companies to include designs on their company web sites and only need to update the designs but not touch their web sites for web site visitors to see the latest and greatest designs.

A Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey writes in:

How large of an image can I generate with Project Freewheel?

Software Architect, Ben Cochran noted:

The Project Freewheel API that returns an image has an upper limit to the size of the image that it will compute. Since the number of pixels goes up by the square of the resolution, allowing people to increase the requested image width or height to large sizes can make the number of pixels Project Freewheel has to compute grow exponentially. When this happens, the Project Freewheel server requires very large amounts of RAM. To prevent malicious users from intentionally crashing Project Freewheel, we limit the amount of RAM any one image request can make. For Project Freewheel this value is 7,480,000 pixels. When exceeding this value on Project Freewheel, the caller of theAPI gets an “Error rendering DWF File” message.

Autodesk Labs VP, Brian Mathews, chimed in with an HTML page that provided some sample code. I have posted it to my blog:

Using Project Freewheel's parametric API to make tiled maps

Keep those questions coming in to labs.freewheel@autodesk.com. Helping clarify how design data can be viewed using just a web browser is alive in the lab.

Project Showroom and Project Freewheel Maintenance Window

Our IT department planned on conducting some network maintenance on

April 3 from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm Pacific time.

Service to Project Freewheel and Project Showroom would have been affected and these technology previews would not have been available. The maintenance work has been postponed. I will post another message at a later date when the window is rescheduled. Thanks for your patience.