Rogue Wave® Views is organized as a set of C++ class libraries accompanied by several auxiliary editing tools to help you design your interfaces.

The Rogue Wave Views libraries provide the API needed to implement the programmable portions of your applications. As a true object-oriented C++ library, Rogue Wave Views emphasizes code reuse through inheritance. Each derived class specializes its base class, adding to or modifying inherited structure and behavior. This means that if a particular class does not have a feature you are looking for, you should also check its base class to see if the feature is inherited. When deriving your own classes, you can use the existing class features and write only the new code you need, thus reducing development and maintenance costs.

The Rogue Wave Views API is written in C++, a superset of C, from which you can call your C routines if necessary. Because C++ is flexible and resource efficient, it has become the most widely used and preferred object-oriented language.

The object-oriented capabilities provided by C++ allow code reuse and thus saves coding time. With a class hierarchy, a library of C++ classes is more flexible, extensible, and dependable than a procedure-oriented library.

Object-oriented programming suits graphics-oriented applications particularly well, because graphic objects often have similar operations performed on them. For example, a button is a specialized type of rectangle, and can thus inherit all the features of a rectangle without recoding. This hierarchical nature provides for easier, timesaving development and maintenance procedures.

Object-oriented code allows you to extend or specialize Rogue Wave Views objects for your own application (or library) without knowing the details of the Rogue Wave Views implementation. Similarly, your customers can specialize your objects without knowing details of your implementation. In addition, you can create your own library for your applications on top of the Rogue Wave Views library by creating subclasses.

The organization of Rogue Wave Views class hierarchy makes it easy for you to find what you need. For example, using the classes in the diagram below, you can easily create sophisticated interfaces with minimum coding.