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.