| Before You Start |
ILOG JViews Charts is a comprehensive set of Java tools and libraries for creating business, scientific, and real-time charts. Charts can be used in various applications including high-performance real-time displays, deeply customized displays, static and dynamic Web displays, and many more.
At its core, JViews Charts is essentially a Software Development Kit (SDK), designed for use by Java user interface developers. It is delivered as a well documented and thoroughly tested collection of Java classes for building and controlling every aspect of a chart display. In addition to this SDK, JViews Charts is delivered with a point-and-click visual editing tool called Designer for JViews Charts. (This name is usually abbreviated to simply Designer, although note that there are similarly named tools for other JViews products).
Designer is the logical starting point for using the product, offering a user-friendly design environment for describing many of the visual and behavioral characteristics of your chart display. Yet whereas Designer can be used to preconfigure parts of the display, it is expected that you will need to complete your chart application by writing code using the SDKs. This is required because most applications where JViews Charts is employed require some specialized display or behavior characteristic that is only available via the SDK. Most application developers can find the functionality they need by using the Designer and the provided SDK. It should be noted, however, that the Java classes in the SDK are designed for extensibility. When necessary, you can extend these classes to create the precise user interface that your end users require.
ILOG JViews Charts features a point-and-click editor called Designer for defining most of visual and behavioral aspects of your chart display. In addition, it allows developers to connect the chart being constructed to a variety of data sources and then test the display and interaction of the display. Designer helps developers ensure that their chart display reacts as expected under a variety of conditions and with a variety of data sets.
The output of
Designer is a Charts Designer project file (identified by its .icpr
extension) that defines the static configuration and dynamic behavior of the
chart display. Static configuration includes type of chart (line, bar, pie,
and so on), axes and labeling options, and many more. Dynamic behavior includes
interactors (behaviors such as selection) and visual changes that occur upon
some data changes (for example, how a chart value is drawn when it exceeds a particular
threshold). The Charts Designer project file will be loaded by the Java
application, where elements of it can be accessed by the SDK, and enhanced and
extended.
The JViews Charts product is shipped with dozens of code samples, complete with source code. They are organized according to topic, such as Customizing Rendering and Web Deployment with JavaServer Faces. Each sample is ready to run, either as an applet or application, or as a thin client. (The latter samples require the included Tomcat web server to first be started. For these samples, your machine will act as both web server and browser client.)
The Samples page of the documentation includes three links at the top of the left side which should not be overlooked.
Introduction to the Samples lists the entire collection of samples with a short description and picture.
Starting the Samples contains the configuration information needed to compile and run the applications, including the server-side information.
Feature Index contains two tables, one that cross references each sample with the features it shows (such as "chart annotations"), and the other that lists the important Java classes used in each sample. These tables are especially useful to developers who are looking for some code fragment to illustrate a particular feature of the product.
The Code Examples page adds dozens of smaller examples to the samples list. Like the samples, they are ready to run or compile on their own, but, unlike the samples, they are typically far simpler and meant to show just a single feature.
The JViews Charts SDK provides all of the services that the product offers, including those of the Designer. (In fact, the Designer was written with this underlying SDK.) Developers use the Designer to parameterize the chart views, the data model, and the interaction capabilities without coding, using point-and-click interaction. However, the SDK APIs provide a programmatic way to accomplish all of this and more (including printing and thin-client deployment, which is not covered by the Designer).
Developers can choose to ignore the rapid development environment of the Designer and begin coding directly with the SDK, although this is not the recommended development path. In any case, for all but the simplest applications, developers need to be familiar with the SDK and code with it.
Unlike the other products in the ILOG JViews family, the JViews Charts documentation is shipped by itself. (The exception is when the JViews Gantt product is in use--in that case, JViews Charts is shipped along with JViews Gantt.)
See About This Documentation Set for more information about documentation.
For information about running the samples refer to the section "Running the Samples" in the documentation on starting the samples.
In order to compile an ILOG JViews program you need to have the appropriate ILOG JViews libraries in the Java classpath. All the necessary libraries can be found in the lib directory. Refer to the Distribution Structure for more information.
Note that if you are using an IDE, the installation of the ILOG JViews libraries in this IDE is highly IDE dependent. Please refer to the documentation of your IDE.