How to create and interactive, distributable program?

[Martin Lüthi]

Great task.... I am not shure about creating a FE package from scratch in
three months. There is plenty of very good, fast and tested code around to
build upon: Check for example 

http://sal.kachinatech.com/B/2
http://www.engr.usask.ca/~macphed/finite/fe_resources/fe_resources.html

Two free codes that I can recommend (but there are many, many others):

Tochnog (http://tochnog.sourceforge.net): Does about everything, 2D, 3D,
        remeshing, coupled analysis, easy to use (no graphical frontend)
        GPL

Deal.II (http://www.dealii.org/): Very fast C++ library, but you have to 
        code the equations yourself in C++
        QT-style license

With such a bullet-proof backing you only have to write the frontend that
generates inputfiles and reads outputfiles. I wrote a small GPL'd library in
Python for the task of FE-file conversion that could be useful
(http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/feval, no project page yet).

Hope this of help for you

Martin


-- 
Martin Lüthi                 answer at tnoo.net