In 1999 I started working for a company which back then was called Fugro GeoSoft Solutions (in Singapore) - I think it's changed its name a couple of times now though. One of the projects I worked on was a GUI for an engine that they had developed called ATRANS. I don't think ATRANS exists anymore but when I joined it was used by a number of Oil and Gas companies to convert ASCII data to Microstation DGN format (Microstation 95 running on Sun Solaris UNIX workstations).ATRANS was a C program built using MDL (the Microstation Development Language). It was like an early spatial ETL (Extract Transform and Load) tool - somewhat similar in concept to Safe Software's FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) product. You would specify using a FDF (feature definition format) file how the ASCII data should be read and transformed into a DGN file. It was a very powerfull and flexible tool for its time - we often used it to convert UKOOA P1/90 files to shot point plots in CAD.
As we were moving away from UNIX and more towards Windows NT my boss asked me if it would be possible to build a GUI for the FDF file creation (which was previously done in UNIX using VI)... it would mean that users did not need to be so familiar with the FDF file format which was a bit cumbersome. The result is shown in the screen capture above - the application parsed and generated FDF files into an object model and could also execute the FDF file against the ATRANS MDL by using a simple Shell command. It also used RTF to nicely colour code the FDF file elements - just like a proper IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
