At some point you need to develop one of the following types of
application: a Java™ Swing
application, an applet, or a servlet. In this application, you
create an IlvDiagrammer object, you load the project
generated by the Designer, and you add the Swing or DHTML toolbars
and menus to control the diagram with buttons like zoom, pan, edit,
and so on.
For prototyping, you can decide to start
with the prebuilt JViews Diagrammer application that only requires
a loaded project to run.
Customizing the application
You may well have precise requirements for
your application that cannot be satisfied just with the style
sheets and the prebuilt behavior of JViews Diagrammer. This is
the case if your application requires specialized interactions or
if you had to implement the data model interface to connect to
your application data.
With the JViews Diagrammer SDK, you have a
comprehensive API to use or extend the Java classes involved in
the creation of your diagram. You can basically access all the
entities that play a role in and around the diagram: the SDM
engine, the data sources, the renderers, the grapher, the views,
the interactors, the composite graphics, and the graphic objects
themselves.
Some of these classes belong to Rogue Wave® JViews Framework, which
provides low-level graphics services. With Rogue Wave JViews Framework, you have
in-depth control of the underlying graphical system that helps
you to go beyond the limits of the JViews Diagrammer diagram
component.
The Rogue Wave JViews Framework path
It could happen that you are not satisfied
with using a JViews Diagrammer diagram component to build a
diagram. You may prefer to manage the drawing process, the
synchronization between the graphics and your data, the refresh
modes, and so on, for yourself.
If this is your choice, if you do not like high-level components
that hide the graphics complexity or do not want the styling
mechanism provided by JViews Diagrammer, the JViews Diagrammer product
remains a great choice for you: you can find everything you want
in Rogue Wave JViews
Framework and the Graph Layout package, which are part of JViews Diagrammer. (Graph
layout features are available only if you have purchased a full
JViews Diagrammer license.)
However, you can still use the powerful symbols you may have
designed using the Symbol Editor. By default, symbols are based
on CSS and are interpreted at run time. But you can also generate
the Java source code corresponding to some or all of your symbols
(see Using the Symbol Compiler). In
this case, generated symbols are JavaBeans™
and subclasses of IlvCompositeGraphic. The JViews Framework
allows you to instantiate and fully manage such objects in your
applications. You will have more control over the way objects are
created, deleted, and animated.
With the JViews
Framework approach, you can manage the grapher class yourself,
you can create your own graphic objects and links that you place
in the grapher, and you can apply graph layout algorithms from JViews Diagrammer to lay
out the diagram.
This alternative approach was taken by thousands of Rogue Wave
JViews developers before JViews
Diagrammer was put on the market. However, it is likely that you
will have to code many services that are prebuilt for you in JViews Diagrammer. Your
results can be similar, and you will surely be able to manage the
diagram very precisely, but your project will be more costly.