Before you start

Rogue Wave® JViews Diagrammer is a comprehensive set of Java™ components, tools and libraries for creating diagram-based editing, visualization, supervision and monitoring applications.

Design tools that can accelerate the configuration of your diagram.

Software Development Kits (SDKs).

The SDKs deliver the true power of Rogue Wave products to you, the Java user interface developer. They consist of well-designed, tested, and fully documented Java APIs for building and controlling every aspect of the diagram display. While you can use the design tools to preconfigure parts of the display, it is expected that you will need to write often significant parts of your final application using the SDKs. Though the SDKs cover a variety of prebuilt features and services, they are designed for extensibility: when necessary, you can extend the classes in the libraries to create the precise user interface that your users require.

Diagrams. The first type of display is made of general diagrams. A diagram is a picture that contains a set of graphic objects and links corresponding to relationships between entities or nodes. Work flows, data flows, business processes, network topologies are good examples of diagrams. When you develop an interface that manages diagrams, your starting point is usually a data model containing all the relevant information for automating the display. In this case, JViews Diagrammer provides tools, techniques and APIs to take data models (containing nodes and links) and automate the creation of sophisticated interfaces, such as interactive modelers or monitoring displays. The data model drives the automatic creation of graphic objects, a styling engine indicates how the information is displayed, graph layout algorithms manage automatic placement, and components allow developers to customize the final display.

Dashboards. The second type of display is a Dashboard. It corresponds to monitoring displays where the graphic objects are manually positioned on the display and then connected to their underlying real-world business objects. In this case, the data model does not drive the creation of the graphics, but it provides the data to feed the display. Dashboards often mimic reality, domain-specific concepts or physical assets, and are commonly used for industrial, business or IT monitoring.

Map Displays. This is a variant of a diagram in which the background is a map and the overlaid objects are georeferenced. For advanced map displays or rich backgrounds, JViews Maps complements JViews Diagrammer with a strong support of GIS features, formats and symbologies.

In the three types of display described above, the common concept is the Symbol, an intelligent graphic object used to populate the interface. For diagrams and map displays, symbols are automatically created from the information provided by the data model. For dashboards, symbols are manually placed on the screen and then fed with actual data.