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Maps > Getting started > Introducing JViews Maps > About JViews Maps > The added value of JViews Maps 
 
The added value of JViews Maps 
Presents the key benefits of JViews Maps.
*Overview
*Gives an overview of the benefits of JViews Maps.
*Display of complex maps
*Explains why JViews Maps can display complex maps.
*Performance
*Explains why JViews Maps brings performance.
*Component libraries
*Describes the advantages of component libraries.
*Map Builder
*Describes the advantages of the Map Builder.
*Map preparation
*Describes the map data formats that are handled by JViews Maps.
*Advanced map animation
*Presents more advanced features for map animation.
Overview
Rogue Wave®  JViews Maps is the solution for delivering asset-management map displays. Its completely open API is designed to hide the complexity of building such displays by handling all the lower-level mapping engine functionality. You can concentrate on the data you want to display, rather than map formats, projections, spatial reference systems, huge data sets, and so on.
JViews Maps provides a unique combination of advanced technology support and in particular:
*High performance background maps for zooming, panning, rotating, and so on.
*Advanced overlays as symbols that can, for example, change state according to specific sensors.
Using the JViews Maps advanced technology you can mix rich background maps with interactive foreground objects. A mixture of the two is required by most if not all supervision applications needed to monitor assets within their earthly context (town map, country map, or building floor plans). Refer to Before you start to understand the purpose and relationship of background maps and the overlay parts of JViews Maps.
In general, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) focus on map creation, such as placing news roads or buildings on a map, and map distribution across servers and networks. JViews Maps effectively complements GIS by reusing GIS data and by allowing for fast and efficient applications that permit quick background map development.
Display of complex maps
JViews Maps can display complex maps with numerous overlaid entities due to:
*Advanced rendering techniques
*Smart data loading capabilities
*Multithreaded components
There is a full spectrum of map display capabilities, including the most popular data format readers and writers, geodesic computations such as projections, ellipsoids, and datum, and hundreds of predefined coordinate systems. JViews Maps lets you load maps quickly and create and animate multilayered and multiscale maps with user-defined visual representations. This is achieved by styling properties such as colors or transparency.
Multithreaded components mean that lengthy operations happen in the background so that the application is never frozen waiting for a computation to end. Users can continue working on others tasks and see the results when they are ready. It also greatly helps to improve the perceived performance.
Performance
One of the most striking features is the accelerated performance that is due to load-on-demand and pixel-on-demand for handling very large data sets while minimizing memory footprint. Map labels contribute to easily readable displays. JViews Maps has efficient redraw options and the standard set of interactions such as panning, zooming, selecting, and annotating.
Component libraries
JViews Maps contains component libraries and not ready made tools with a defined feature set. This means that users can easily:
*Modify or extend any existing features and behavior to fit their needs.
*Design the application to fit their architecture and their specific needs.
This flexibility is important for freedom of choice in new application development and also allows the enrichment and extension of legacy applications.
Map Builder
The Map Builder is built from the libraries and is delivered in the source code. Although the Map Builder is a tool for defining the background maps of an application, it also serves three other functions important for getting started with the product quickly:
*Map preparation tool: Using the Map Builder you can prepare a map that mixes different data sources (satellite, intelligence, transportation networks, …) and specify what you want to see, when you want to see it, and how you want to see it. This means that you always get a meaningful display, for example, you do not need to see streets at worldwide level.
*SDK exploration: The Map Builder offers an easy way to accelerate your evaluation of the wide variety of features offered by the SDK.
*Jump starting development: The Map Builder is delivered as source code and built using Rogue Wave®  JViews Maps SDKs. If you want, you can reuse code fragments in your final application.
With the Map Builder, you have access to multiple coordinates and measuring unit systems; contextual grids in Longitude and Latitude or the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) with minimized memory and CPU footprint.
Map preparation
JViews Maps offers the fusion of vector, raster, and terrain elevation data. The data is reprocessed on-the-fly allowing you to mix and match map data whatever its storage parameters are.
You can display contextual information by separating different contexts onto different layers, since different information is visible at different zoom levels if you use the zoom-sensitive look and feel. JViews Maps provides multilayered and scaled maps. You can define your own theme for a map by configuring individual layers differently.
Data formats
JViews Maps allows you to import many different map formats.
Vector formats:
*ESRI Shape (see Shapefile format)
*TIGER/Line
*DXF (see DXF format) files ( .dxf )
*KML and KML Zipped (KMZ) formats ( .kml, .kmz ) (see KML/ KMZ)
*MapInfo MIF/MID (see MIF file)
*SVG files (.svg)
Raster formats:
*GeoTIFF (see GeoTIFF format)
*GIF
*JPG
*PNG
*TIF/TIFF files
*Images from a Web Map Server (see WMS standard)
Databases:
*Oracle® (see Oracle Spatial)
*IBM® DB2® Spatial Extender (see IBM DB2 Spatial Extender)
*IBM® Informix® Spatial DataBlade™ (see IBM Informix Spatial DataBlade)
Terrain elevation:
*NIMA DTED®0, 1, and 2 (see DTED format)
*GTOPO30 DEM
The products offer facilities for exporting various vector, raster, and database formats:
*Vector: ESRI Shape
*Raster: GeoTIFF
*Database: Oracle®
GIS transformations
Dynamic geodesic management is provided through:
*1944 predefined coordinate systems (projection, ellipsoid, and datum parameters)
*27 predefined projections plus user-defined
*58 ellipsoid forms plus user-defined
*Molodensky DATUM
*Well Known Text (WKT) parsing
Contextual grids are supplied as:
*Longitude and latitude
*Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) (rather like the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) system)
JViews Maps offers multiple coordinate systems and the management of multiple units of measurement.
Advanced map animation
The use of a background map and symbols that can be moved in real time across the map, and which can be panned, zoomed and so on, provide advanced map animation features.
There are graphics editing facilities provided by the Symbol Editor for JViews Diagrammer to help you create your own custom symbols, see Developing with design tools>Using the Symbol Editor.
Optimized performance
Modern applications often require large map data sets as satellite and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) views or exhaustive transportation networks to realistically depict situations.
JViews Maps is optimized to efficiently handle such large data sets to provide video-like performance while minimizing memory requirements.
For example, by leveraging load-on-demand and dynamic data subsampling, the memory footprint is minimized, even though the data contains millions of objects. Display performance is based on disk and RAM caching as well as advanced quadtree rendering and automated clipping and tiling. This performance not only provides a better experience for the user, but also saves processing time for other application CPU intensive tasks.
You will be impressed by the reactivity of the interactive zooming and panning, the storage and navigation facilities for Areas of Interest, and the map rotation capability for GPS-like application development.
Symbology
JViews Mapsuses the rule-based presentation layer of JViews Diagrammer to update the appearance and position of assets when underlying application data, such as status or positions, evolve. You can create your own symbology and manipulate vector, raster, and complex objects. Symbols support hierarchical logical grouping. See Developing with design tools>Using the Symbol Editor for details of how to create your own symbols.

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