Before You Start

ILOG JViews Diagrammer is a comprehensive set of Java components, tools and libraries for creating diagram-based editing, visualization, supervision and monitoring applications. JViews Diagrammer offers a variety of tools for Java developers, such as:

• Design tools that can accelerate the configuration of your diagram.
• Software Development Kits (SDKs)

The SDKs deliver the true power of ILOG products to you, the Java user interface developer. They consist of well-designed, tested, and fully documented Java APIs for building and controlling every aspect of the diagram display. While you can use the design tools to preconfigure parts of the display, it is expected that you will need to write often significant parts of your final application using the SDKs. Though the SDKs cover a variety of prebuilt features and services, they are designed for extensibility: when necessary, you can extend the classes in the libraries to create the precise user interface that your end users require.

Depending on the type of display, JViews Diagrammer offers different ways of creating graphical user interfaces:

• Diagrams. The first type of display is made of general diagrams. A diagram is a picture that contains a set of graphic objects and links corresponding to relationships between entities or nodes. Work flows, data flows, business processes, network topologies are good examples of diagrams. When you develop an interface that manages diagrams, your starting point is usually a data model containing all the relevant information for automating the display. In this case, JViews Diagrammer provides tools, techniques and APIs to take data models (containing nodes and links) and automate the creation of sophisticated interfaces, such as interactive modelers or monitoring displays. The data model drives the automatic creation of graphic objects, a styling engine indicates how the information is displayed, graph layout algorithms manage automatic placement, and components allow developers to customize the final display.
• Dashboards. The second type of display is a Dashboard. It corresponds to monitoring displays where the graphic objects are manually positioned on the display and then connected to their underlying real-world business objects. In this case, the data model does not drive the creation of the graphics, but it provides the data to feed the display. Dashboards often mimic reality, domain-specific concepts or physical assets, and are commonly used for industrial, business or IT monitoring.
• Map Displays. This is a variant of a diagram in which the background is a map and the overlaid objects are georeferenced. For advanced map displays or rich backgrounds, JViews Maps complements JViews Diagrammer with a strong support of GIS features, formats and symbologies.

In the three types of display described above, the common concept is the Symbol, an intelligent graphic object used to populate the interface. For diagrams and map displays, symbols are automatically created from the information provided by the data model.

Design Tools

ILOG JViews Diagrammer includes some design tools that you can optionally use to configure parts of your final application before run time. In other words, these tools are typically used to help configure the final application, but are not used when your final application is actually running. The main tools are:

• Symbol Editor, a point-and-click interface used to create palettes of rich interactive symbols. These symbols combine graphic parts, custom behavior, and interactions. They can be used to populate graphical views of your applications. Typical symbols are:
  • Graphic nodes used to create graphs, topologies, entity-relationship diagrams, business processes.
  • Dedicated objects for monitoring and management activities (intelligent icons, gauges, dials, multi-states, bars, and so on).
  • Other GUI objects such as buttons, sliders, or check boxes.

  

  Figure 1. Examples of Symbols

• Designer, a development tool for rapid prototyping and for the initial configuration of an application. It is a point-and-click editor for defining many aspects of the display without coding. Typically, this editor lets you specify how business data should be used to automatically populate graphical views with symbols or links.
• Dashboard Editor, a point-and-click interface used to draw all kinds of schematics and dashboards. Made of standard vector graphic objects and dynamic symbols, the resulting dashboards can then be loaded and connected to actual data at run time. This editor is convenient for creating monitoring displays where the symbols are manually positioned on the display and then connected to their underlying real-world business objects.

The following pictures show how these tools work together for the different types of display:

SDKs

The JViews Diagrammer architecture is multi-layered. (See diagram below.) Each layer provides a specific set of services for developers during the development cycle.

ILOG JViews Diagrammer implements a Swing-like model-view architecture, which provides a clear separation between the data and its presentation. The JViews Diagrammer data model is part of the Styling and Data Mapping (SDM) engine, and it forms the connection between your application data and the views on display.

The Framework SDK sits atop Java2D and Swing, and provides a comprehensive structured 2D graphics API. This includes:

• Graphic objects, interactors, views, transformations
• Editing commands
• Graphs and sub-graphs (nodes and links, sub-diagrams)
• Printing
• Thin client support

The Graph Layout SDK provides a set of sophisticated algorithms to automatically rearrange the graph elements for optimal readability. Graph layout brings order and clarity to complex diagrams, moving the nodes and routing links to create a more usable picture with domain-specific aesthetic conventions.

This complex technology, based on years of research, offers several pre-defined layout algorithms for covering the needs of specific applications. The many parameters let developers arrange the diagrams as they want and visual tools help in the configuration.

Components for Java and Web Deployment

Prebuilt components are available to accelerate the development phase:

• JavaBean components for use with any Java IDE to develop Java applications and applets.
• JavaServer Faces components for developing thin-client Web applications that take advantage of Ajax and DHTML.

Documentation

The documentation set has the following components:

• JViews Diagrammer
• JViews Framework

See About This Documentation Set for more about documentation.

Running the Samples

For information about running the samples please refer to the section "Running the Samples" in the Sample Introduction.

Compiling an ILOG JViews Program

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.