Views Foundation
Views Foundation is a technical package that contains all the base classes for implementing graphic applications. These include display, basic graphic objects, resource management, containers, and basic interactors. It is the base package on top of which any other Views packages are built.
Features
The features of Views Foundation are described in:
Structured 2D Graphics
These features provide basic graphic objects.
Predefined graphic objects: The graphic engine builds on Views primitives to define graphic objects. Rectangles, labels, polygons, splines—and many more—represent the basic graphic objects that you can extend.Views makes a clear separation between graphic objects and behaviors, thus allowing you to apply a particular behavior to an object.
Predefined behavior objects: In Views, a predefined behavior is called an interactor. An interactor can be applied to any graphic object to give it a particular behavior, thus defining its functionality. Containers: Views maintains objects in one of two basic types of storage data structures: containers and managers. A view is associated with a set of graphic objects stored in a container or manager.A container stores a certain number of graphic objects, and it is associated with only one view, which displays the objects stored in the container. Each object can be associated with a specific behavior, and accelerators—which are keyboard events that immediately call a predefined function—can be attached to the container itself.
Besides the containers, Views provides a more efficient data structure called a manager. Managers are in the Views Manager package (included in Views 2D Graphics Standard). Managers provide layers, multiple-view, fast redraw, persistence, and editing functionality. Comparative Features of Managers and Containers, explains the difference.
Graphics Primitives
These basic Foundation features allow you to easily perform sophisticated drawing and display operations.
Windows and views: In Views, a view is an object to which basic services can be added, and which is associated with the window of the underlying display system, such as X Window™ in Unix. All drawing takes place in the view, which displays an image of the objects or a subset of them. This image can be geometrically transformed by moving, zooming, or rotating without affecting the objects themselves.Drawing primitives: Using a two-dimensional vector graphic engine, Views provides drawing ports (memory, screen, and dump file) as well as a large set of drawing primitives to create basic geometric forms. You can draw basic geometric shapes such as arcs, curves, rectangles, labels, and so on. You can draw on the screen, in memory, or generate dump files such as PostScript. You can create black-and-white and color images.Resources: Views provides predefined geometric objects, while also allowing you to create graphic images through the use of numerous drawing tools. You have at your disposal a large selection of resources including fill and line patterns, colors, and font attributes. You use palettes to apply these resources to graphic objects and text. Events: Manage keyboard, mouse, and timer events.Transformers: Manipulate transformers, which are objects that compute geometric transformations to draw graphic objects while applying behavior such as movement, rotation, and zooming. Other Services
ActiveX: ActiveX generation and integration. These services will let you create an ActiveX with a simple button-click operation, and integrate any existing ActiveX in your GUI.Scripting: Script, an implementation of the JavaScript™ scripting language for accessing graphic objects.Internationalization: Internationalized applications, using the POSIX locale model.XML: The XML parser allows you, for example, to read an XML file to create objects in a container, or to write an XML file from Views data.Published date: 05/24/2022
Last modified date: 02/24/2022
