Get Started with Forge

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MICHAEL KILKELLY: Welcome to "Get Started with Forge."

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Here we are in this Space Planning for New Health

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Guidelines learning path.

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And this is the first lesson in our Visualizing Building

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Performance Data with Forge workflow.

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So let's start at the beginning.

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What is Forge?

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Forge is Autodesk's cloud-based developer platform.

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And it allows you to automate Autodesk's software

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through the internet using the Forge API.

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So using Forge, you could do things like generate Revit

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families from a website, or you could process Revit models

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online through an add-in, or even visualize building data

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using a standalone application.

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Forge does this using REST APIs.

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REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer.

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And this is a technology that's used by many web-based APIs,

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so things like Google, Facebook, Instagram,

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sites like that all use REST APIs

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to make themselves more accessible

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to outside developers.

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REST uses standard HTTP operations like GET, PUT,

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or POST, so it's built on the kind of the infrastructure

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of the internet.

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Now REST APIs return data using another format

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called JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation.

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And this is an open standard for transmitting

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data via the internet.

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It's easy to understand.

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You can open it in a text file.

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And it's very easy to generate.

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Now to get started with Forge, you must have a Forge account.

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And Forge requires cloud credits to run processes.

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So any time you run a process on Forge,

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cloud credits will be deducted from your account.

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Now you can sign up for a free trial at Forge.autodesk.com.

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That free trial includes one hundred cloud credits.

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And any time you create an application on Forge,

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you have to register that application.

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And I'll show you how to do that right

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So here I am on the Forge.autodesk.com website.

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And if you click on the Sign Up To Try Forge,

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you can create your own account.

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But once you create your account,

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you get to this My Apps page.

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So I can click on the Create App button.

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And this allows me to register an app with Forge.

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Now I can select which particular

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APIs I'm going to use.

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For my particular application, we're not

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going to use the BIM 360 or the Reality Capture APIs,

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so we can uncheck those.

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Next, I need to add an app name and an app description.

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So I'm going to call this App, building Performance App.

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And the description is Visualize Building Performance

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Using Forge.

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Now I also need to provide a Callback URL.

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And this is just a reference to a website.

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Now the app that we're creating is not

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going to call back to this website,

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but we need to enter it anyways when we register the app.

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So I'm just going to add my own personal website,

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but you can add into your company's website or something

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like that.

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So once that's done, I'm just going to go ahead,

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and I'm going to click the Create App button.

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So now I have my Building Performance App

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registered with Forge.

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And the important thing to know is this Client ID

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and this Client Secret.

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We'll refer back to this Client ID and Client

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Secret in the next lesson when we

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connect to Forge using an external application called

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Postman.