PRODUCT NEWS

New ILOG Views Suite Extends Top Performer
Improving a great product with customer feedback

ILOG’s customers are important to the R&D process, and in upgrading ILOG Views, ILOG has followed their advice by greatly extending the top performer with better Windows integration and a host of new add-ons.

ActiveX Integration
Developers working in the Windows environment will appreciate the ability of the new ILOG Views Component Suite 4.0 to generate ActiveX controls without coding. Coupled with an ability to integrate existing ActiveX elements into an ILOG Views application, the control generation facility makes ILOG Views invaluable for creating Windows-compliant interfaces. With the new ActiveX facilities, a developer can achieve performance figures only accessible through operating at the native level of an operating system.

Application-specific Add-ons
ILOG Views Component Suite 4.0 comprises a set of modules dedicated to specific uses:

• ILOG Views Controls for standard GUI controls
• ILOG Views 2D Graphics for structured and interactive intuitive 2D graphic
  objects
• ILOG Views Data Access for connecting GUIs and data sources
• ILOG Views Charts for powerful data visualization
• ILOG Views Maps for map-based applications
• ILOG Views Graph Layout for automatic arrangement of network displays

All the add-ons are based on the foundation layer, which includes ActiveX support, an XML parser and ILOG Studio.

Improvements and Innovations
ILOG Studio, the graphics editor of ILOG Views, has been improved with a new interface and plug-in support for adding modules. This design also allows the developer to take immediate advantage of future modules released for ILOG Views.

ILOG Views Controls comes with a powerful wizard that helps the developer quickly create applications that are fully compliant with the Windows look and feel. It also provides full independence between the data and the GUI, and maintains consistency between several views of a common data model.

ILOG Views 2D Graphics includes the GrapherPin, a new device that lets the developer indicate where a line should touch a graphic object. The GrapherPin works with ILOG Views Graph Layout, the new add-on for automatically arranging graphs. It greatly reduces the complexity of laying out graphs and showing the relationships between elements and links.

For those working with Oracle applications, ILOG Views’ multiformat map handler has been improved with a reader for Oracle Spatial. ILOG Views Maps has also been equipped with a memory-saving load-on-demand mechanism for large data sets.

Finally, for producing professional charts in record time, ILOG produced a new chart library: ILOG Views Charts. It comes with polar and rectangular representations.