This paper presents the development and applications of the software package JIFEX, a new finite element system which can be used for structural analysis and optimum design by the modern computer hardware and software technologies such as MS Windows95/NT and Pentium PC platforms. The complete system of JIFEX is programmed with $C/C^{++}$ language to make full use of advanced facilities of MS Windows95/NT. In the system, the finite element data pre-processing, based on the most popular CAD package AutoCAD (R13, R14), has been implemented, so that the finite element modeling could be integrated with geometric modeling of CAD. The system not only has interactive graphics facility for data post-processing, but also realizes the real-time computing visualization by means of the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) technique. Running on the Pentium computers, JIFEX can solve large-scale finite element analysis problems such as the ones with more than 60000 nodes in the finite element model.