Contains information on deploying your Rogue Wave® JViews Diagrammer applications.

JViews Diagrammer offers a set of components, classes and APIs making it possible to build all sorts of graphical displays. The core Graphics Framework provides interactive vector-graphics primitives that will have their own life cycle and can be displayed in a variety of containers, including Swing or servlets. With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and SDM, the creation of such graphic objects is automated and sophisticated displays are built more easily. Most of the work needed to create specific visual representations is the same, whether you decide to deploy your application with rich or thin-client technologies. What is really important is to make sure that:

This section summarizes the main characteristics and tips of each deployment strategy.

This is the most traditional way to deploy JViews applications. All graphical styles and interactions are available, and there are very few limitations. Traditionally, applications are deployed using the IlvDiagrammer class (derived from a JComponent ) or classes of the ilog.views.diagrammer.application package. Note that the IlvDiagrammerApplication class is a top-level container that allows you to create either applications or Java™ Web Start applications.

See Writing an application in Using the Designer.

A Java™ Web Start (JWS) application can be seen as an applet running outside a browser. It allows you to have rich applications automatically downloaded, with great user experience. Except for careful packaging and for the same security issues, there are no particular limitations for creating JWS applications with JViews Diagrammer.

Creating applications for the Web is substantially different from the rich-client approach. It implies that most of the work is done on a remote server which sends ready-to-use images and scripts to a Web client (usually an Internet browser). There are many variants but the main idea is to receive and process HTTP requests on a server and, in return, to produce the right image to be sent back to the browser. Even if there are many architectural differences, the following aspects can be shared between rich and thin clients:

The main differences reside in the way the application behaves and how it is packaged. Thin clients are usually driven by transactions and only partially support rich interactions. JViews Diagrammer thin clients are based on the JavaServer™ Faces (JSF) and DHTML technologies. Web pages containing visual components are created as (JSP) pages. The JSF-based components (also known as JViews Diagrammer Faces) provide the following services:

The use of these JSF and DHTML components is described in the section Building Web applications of the documentation. This section also describes how to deploy resources for your Web applications.

It is possible to deploy graphic components created with JViews Diagrammer as Eclipse™ or RCP (Eclipse Rich Client Platform) plug-ins. As with the thin client approach, graphical contents, styling, and connections to data sources can be reused under Eclipse. The main challenge is to integrate graphical panels and manage interactions with the Eclipse framework. Since Eclipse 3.0, making Swing-based code work within an Eclipse application is possible with the SWT-AWT bridge. Located in the org.eclipse.swt.awt package, this bridge offers a very simple interface between Eclipse and Swing widgets. Once a Swing container has been created inside an SWT widget, all AWT/Java 2D™ primitives can be invoked. Note that this bridge only works with JDK 1.5 and higher. In the samples directory, you will find examples of such integration. The source code is provided, so you can make the integration package evolve with your own requirements.

JViews Diagrammer also provides its own bridge, IlvSwingControl, to display diagrams and dashboards inside Eclipse or RCP. For details, see Using JViews products in Eclipse RCP applications.