At some point you need to develop one of the following types of application: a Java™ Swing application 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.

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.

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.