| Before You Start |
ILOG JViews Maps offers a wide range of
mapping services for building custom user interfaces. To provide these services, it relies
on services provided by JViews Diagrammer. To be successful with the JViews Maps product, it
is important for you to understand its architecture and its dependencies.
ILOG JViews Maps is a collection of:
The applications are prebuilt and:
These applications are typically used to configure parts of your application before run time.
They accelerate application development, but do not need to be used within your final delivery.
The structure of ILOG JViews Maps is shown below:
The features of ILOG JViews Maps are also available through the SDKs, which provide a full range of features and greater flexibility. If necessary, you can extend the Java classes to create the precise user interface that your end user requires.
ILOG JViews Maps includes the following applications:
This tool is used to define the background of your runtime application. However, if your application needs to configure its background dynamically at run time, you can use the ILOG JViews Maps SDK directly.
With just a few mouse clicks, the Map Builder allows you to:
An example of the Map Builder for ILOG JViews Maps is shown below:
The end result can be saved as a map definition file that is loaded at
run time.
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Although the Map Builder is a tool for defining the background maps of an application, it also serves two other functions important for getting started with the product.
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ILOG JViews Diagrammer is bundled with ILOG JViews Maps and manages the foreground interactive objects used to depict your assets. ILOG JViews Diagrammer adds a data-driven, rule-based philosophy:
An example of styling rules is shown below:
Contained in JViews Diagrammer, the Symbol Editor is 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.
Symbols can be used to represent:
Designer for JViews Diagrammer is a point-and-click application used to create the styling rules that specify the visual appearance of your application data.
Designer for JViews Diagrammer gives you a clear idea of the final display, as it allows you to import a sample data model, the map files created with the Map Builder, pre-built or custom symbol libraries, and interactively test rules on these data sets. It allows you to describe and test the mapping and custom logic between a domain-specific data model as used by your application, and how this information drives changes to the Symbols.
For example, a rule could look like the following:
If there is an object of the type Airplane with a Status property equal to Critical
Then modify the monitored_asset parameter so that its background color switches to red
The output is a JViews Diagrammer project file that you import into your application code and extend using the SDKs.
ILOG JViews Maps includes four different component libraries.
The topmost layer represents the Java code of the application, which can interact with any or all of the SDKs provided, or bypass them when required and directly call the Java2D or Swing APIs.
For example, the ILOG JViews Diagrammer SDK is needed when you display interactive objects on top of your maps (the symbols), whereas the ILOG JViews Maps SDK handles the map background manipulations.
The modules in this architecture and the services they offer are shown below:
Starting with the bottom layer, all ILOG JViews libraries are built on top of the Java2D and Swing libraries, with no platform-specific code. This means that applications developed with ILOG JViews run on any platform that supports Java.
On top of this low-level layer is the JViews Framework layer, which includes among others, efficient data structures, prebuilt user interaction services, and a printing facility. JViews Framework is not sold by ILOG as a separate product; it serves as a core component of each of the products in the ILOG JViews product line.
Above JViews Framework is JViews Maps, which provides a wide range of map manipulation and display services. It is built on the data structures and I/O facilities of JViews Framework.
At the same level, there is ILOG JViews Diagrammer, which provides a wide variety of displays consisting of custom graphic objects that are data-aware. This means that the graphic objects in the display can change their appearance as the underlying data model changes. For example, a graphic object that represents a vehicle can have its color change if its status field changes.
ILOG JViews Diagrammer uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that will be very familiar to Java programmers used to the Swing structure. Its purpose is to separate the data model from the views and connect the two with a rule-based style manager that controls the look of the objects based on the data values, see below:
JViews Diagrammer calls this mechanism Styling and Data Mapping (SDM). It is used by ILOG JViews Maps to store and manipulate any interactive object that appears on top of a map.
Thus, ILOG JViews Maps uses two distinct data structures:
The final application is Java code that performs a mix of Swing, Java2D, and JViews SDK calls. The application code can be as little as a few lines that simply load the outputs of files created by the ILOG JViews Maps application, or a sophisticated analysis tool with dynamic map and data feeds. In both cases, the reuse of ideas and code from the Map Builder application is encouraged.
The documentation set has the following components:
See About This Documentation Set for more about documentation.
For information about running the samples, refer to the section "Running the Samples" in the Sample Introduction.
In order to compile an ILOG JViews program you need to have the appropriate ILOG JViews libraries in the Java classpath. All the 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.