JViews Diagrammer contains several design tools to
automate the production of applications without coding. The design
tools are point-and-click editors that allow user interface developers
to quickly prototype the look and feel of the display without having
to spend time with Java™
code.
These tools address the different aspects involved with producing
appropriate content for graphical diagrams, dashboards and map displays.
Besides the need to reduce the coding part of an application, the
design tools help address the different roles in the development chain.
For example, a graphic designer can provide attractive content for
the user interface without necessarily being involved in technical
development, or an application administrator can enrich the application
without modifying the core of the system.
The design tools provided with JViews Diagrammer
are:
Symbol Editor
A
point-and-click interface that allows you to create and edit symbols.
It also enables you to add dynamic behavior to these symbols with
rules defining how the elements of the symbol will react to data changes.
For example, rules can define the alarm conditions that will cause
a part of a factory symbol to blink, or how far a needle on a rotary
gauge will rotate. Symbols are organized in palettes that are reusable
in other design tools.
Designer
A
point-and-click editor for easily specifying most aspects of a diagram.
It is well-suited for defining the look and feel of applications that
must automatically create a diagram—such as a business process,
a network typology, a workflow, a data flow, or entity-relational
diagrams—from a data source.
Dashboard Editor
A point-and-click interface for the easy creation of
industrial panels, business dashboards and other generic human-machine
interfaces. It allows users to manually place symbols, created with
the Symbol Editor, on top of a static background. It then connects
them to the underlying data.
Symbol Compiler
The
Symbol Compiler is a tool that allows you to translate the symbol
definition created with the Symbol Editor into Java classes. The symbols
that you create in the Symbol Editor use a CSS file to store the information
necessary to their graphical representation. A compiled symbol provides
improvements in terms of performance, as it is created in Java code
instead of CSS, and flexibility, as its features can be extended through
the JViews Framework API.