Easy Development of Visual Interfaces

ILOG JViews Maps and Maps for Defense give developers a powerful foundation for quickly creating advanced graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In addition to a fully programmable software development kit (SDK), these products contain several design tools to automate application production without coding. These tools address the different aspects of producing appropriate content for map-based views.

Building an ILOG JViews map display
Building a display with ILOG JViews Maps is simple. The typical process consists of designing an application with the visual design tools, then customizing the result with the underlying SDK.

There are three point-and-click editors that allow user interface developers to quickly create a prototype for the look-and-feel of the display, without having to use Java code. These tools are used to refine and test the prototype against multiple data sets. When satisfied with the basic aspects of the new displays, developers can use the SDK to add highly custom interactions or other functionality.

The typical development process for a JViews Maps display. Each orange box is a link to more information.

The point-and-click editors are:

• Map Builder—Use this tool to define the initial set of background maps for the application, as well as their appearance.
• Symbol Editor—Use this tool—also available with ILOG JViews Diagrammer—to build geo-referenced, data-aware map symbols.
• Designer—Use this tool—also available with ILOG JViews Diagrammer—to connect the symbols and maps already defined, and to test different data sets.

Key features and benefits:

• Easy prototyping: developers can create prototypes with little or no coding.
• Rapid application development: the output of the visual design tool chain is designed to be the start of the application development, so the prototyping effort is completely usable in the final application.
• The design tools are adapted to various roles in the development chain, including graphic artists, map specialists, GUI specialists, and Java language developers.
• Easy Map definition: Map Builder enables users to view all the supported map data formats, mix and layer the maps, and define all map attributes. The result can be loaded at runtime as the initial background map for any symbol data that will be placed on it.
• Symbols are reusable. Symbol Editor is shipped with pre-built lists of symbols suitable for use in a mapping application, but users can easily create new symbols for use in any JViews application.
• Reduced maintenance: all ILOG JViews Maps tools use data definition files, which are easier to modify and maintain than Java code.
• Application flexibility: ILOG JViews Maps tools can be deployed along with the final application, to enable the end user to modify graphics.

The final result of the visual tool chain is an application project file. This file typically defines an initial set of data. It is read by the mapping application, which is created using the ILOG JViews Maps or ILOG Maps for Defense software development kit (SDK). Many samples are shipped with the products, to serve as starting points for the development of the mapping application. The SDK can be used to modify this data or load additional data as needed.