A CAD development company's view of where IcARX shines, where it required workarounds, and what we'd tell another team starting today.
This is part of a series sharing how development companies are using IcARX to bring their products to IntelliCAD-based CAD platforms. IcARX is the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium's ObjectARX®-compatible C++ API. For developers with existing ObjectARX projects, it offers a familiar API surface and a practical path to a new host CAD without a complete rewrite.
If you're a development team weighing whether to bring an existing ObjectARX-based product to a new CAD platform, the questions you actually want answered are technical. Will my code compile and behave the way I expect? Where will I hit friction? What kind of testing matrix should I plan for?
This post is built around those questions. The source is a structured Q&A with Cadomation's CEO, Imran Anees, about their work bringing SPCAD, an advanced geospatial and surveying toolkit with more than 180 specialized commands, into the progeCAD environment using the IcARX API.
SPCAD already ran on multiple ObjectARX-compatible CAD platforms before this work began. Adding progeCAD was a deliberate platform expansion, made tractable by an architecture designed from the start to span multiple CAD environments. That foundation is part of why the IcARX path was realistic.
What follows is organized as problem to approach to outcome, with specific technical observations called out where they help.
CAD users in surveying and civil design were jumping between multiple applications to complete a single workflow. Each handoff cost time and introduced opportunities for error. Cadomation's product hypothesis was simple: bring those workflows into a single CAD environment so users could manage geospatial data, terrain models, and parcels in one connected place.
For SPCAD, the question was where that environment should live. The platform had to satisfy two constraints at once:
progeCAD, built on the IntelliCAD engine, met both. The IcARX framework was singled out as especially important because it created a practical path for ARX-style development and for reusing existing code.
"The IcARX framework was especially important as it created a practical path for ARX-style development and code reuse." Imran Anees, CEO, Cadomation
Cadomation framed this work as a focused product adaptation rather than a from-scratch build. SPCAD was already a mature, multi-CAD product, so the team moved through three phases:
The work was led by Cadomation's core CAD development team, with the explicit goal of making SPCAD behave reliably inside progeCAD so users would get the professional experience they expected.
Two things stood out as genuine strengths of the IcARX surface from a porting perspective.
The core layer was solid.
For SPCAD, which works heavily with entities, geometry, custom commands, and production workflows, IcARX provided a practical way to bring substantial functionality across without a rewrite. The object and database model and the command-driven workflow patterns were familiar enough that the port was realistic.
"IcARX gave us a practical way to bring substantial functionality into progeCAD without rewriting the product from scratch."
Native-style entities and database access were strong.
When asked which IcARX capabilities were most important, the answer was direct: access to native-style entities and database functionality. SPCAD handles real CAD objects and complex production workflows, so having control over drawing databases and geometry was essential for terrain modeling, cadastral processing, and drawing automation.
The lesson for other teams: if your application's center of gravity is in the object database and core geometry, IcARX gives you a familiar, capable foundation.
Cadomation was upfront about where the work got harder. The challenge was not the core logic. It was API parity at the edges, where higher-level UI behavior, customization, helper methods, and managed-wrapper coverage diverged from what an ObjectARX®-trained team expected.
In some cases, functions were missing. In others, they existed but behaved differently enough to require workarounds and extra validation.
A few specific examples surfaced in the interview, and they're worth listing because they're the kind of detail another team will want to plan for:
These are real, concrete differences. They are not blockers, but they are not invisible either. Cadomation's takeaway was that productizing on IcARX required compatibility layers, fallbacks, and careful testing, and they planned for that explicitly.
"Successful productization required compatibility layers, fallbacks, and careful testing."
The good news, in their words: they're confident the IntelliCAD core development team will continue to address these issues and strengthen API compatibility in future releases.
The user response has been encouraging. SPCAD users appreciate getting advanced surveying and terrain capabilities inside a CAD platform they already know. International demand surfaced quickly, including requests for multi-language support, which Cadomation now treats as a primary driver of its development roadmap.
Commercially, the platform expanded Cadomation's reach into customer segments that prioritize:
In Imran's framing, the IntelliCAD ecosystem moved Cadomation beyond a single-platform strategy and opened opportunities they did not have before.
A practical wish list for the IntelliCAD platform, captured straight from the interview:
These are useful inputs for the IntelliCAD core team and for the broader developer community to know about. Several of them are areas the platform team is actively working on.
Looking forward, SPCAD is expanding into:
Imran summed up the underlying principle: keep reducing the gap between CAD drafting and geospatial and civil engineering production work.
Pulling the practitioner observations together into a short list other developers can use:
This is one developer's experience, captured honestly. Other teams will have different starting points, different dependencies, and different timelines. What we can say is that the lessons here, both the strengths and the friction points, are consistent with what we hear from other IcARX developers.
If you'd like to dig deeper, we're hosting a developer webinar on June 16: Build on IntelliCAD: Developer Platform Options for Every CAD Application. The session walks through the development paths available on IntelliCAD, including IcARX, IRX, native Teigha .NET®, AutoLISP, and our new Integrator tier, with case studies drawn from companies building on the platform, including Cadomation.
To learn more about the IntelliCAD platform and the IcARX API, visit intellicad.org. To learn more about Cadomation and SPCAD, visit cadomation.com. To learn more about progeCAD and progeSOFT, visit progeSOFT.com.
Autodesk, AutoCAD, ObjectARX, DWG, and AutoLISP are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. IntelliCAD Technology Consortium is not affiliated with or endorsed by Autodesk. SPCAD is the proprietary property of Cadomation. Microsoft and .NET are registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.