ILOG has announced ILOG JViews 8, the latest version of ILOG’s award-winning Java graphics tools suite that targets more users in the user interface collaboration chain – from developers and graphic designers to application administrators – and eases the creation of supervision and monitoring applications. The new release introduces new tools for creating more realistic-looking active symbols representing real-world objects, resulting in richer user displays, and a new feature that allows for easy and rapid creation of dashboards. ILOG JViews 8 also offers deeper support for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) for Maps, and support for direct editing of diagrams and charts from a Web browser. ILOG JViews was the first graphics suite to adopt the Ajax standard earlier this year.

The new JViews 8 product suite includes JViews Diagrammer, JViews Charts, JViews Gantt, JViews Maps, JViews Maps for Defense and JViews TGO, and is available immediately.

Supervision and monitoring systems are key to detecting, understanding, and solving problems in a variety of industrial and business domains. To be fully effective, the user interface must be comprehensible and business specific and it must deliver information in real-time (i.e., no latency when navigating between screens or when receiving updates). In all cases, active symbology must be used that represents the physical world or concepts being monitored and their status to help users understand the information being presented.

ILOG JViews 8 introduces two new tools that can enhance symbology for making large quantities of data more comprehensible for users: Symbol Editor for the easy creation of active symbols for real-world objects and Dashboard Editor for the easy creation of industrial and business dashboards combining these symbols. As a result, the new ILOG JViews 8 greatly improves the job of creating custom diagrams or map displays for supervision and monitoring applications. The new Symbol Editor allows graphic designers to create, edit, and organize active symbols, and their dynamic response to data changes. This tool is fully interoperable with graphic authoring tools, such as Adobe Illustrator, to ensure that the visual elements of the symbol are as appealing as possible. Using the new Dashboard Editor, users can create industrial and business dashboards easily. They can draw or import static backgrounds, drag and drop active symbols (created with Symbol Editor) on top of the background, and then connect them to real-time data—all without any Java coding.

JViews Dashboards can be deployed as desktop clients, or in the browser, as applets or thin clients that take advantage of innovative Ajax technology. ILOG JViews 8 comes equipped with a variety of pre-built Symbol sets, such as Workflow icons, Application/Network/Traffic management symbols, and a collection of intelligent controls (such as gauges, sliders, progress bars, dials).

Extended AJAX Support
Ajax, a development technique for creating interactive Web applications, enhances the Web user’s experience by generating images more quickly because it eliminates the need to constantly refresh Web pages every time a user makes a change. Extended Ajax coverage in JViews 8 means more real-time delivery of information and allows developers to leverage Ajax for process and network diagrams and Gantt charts, giving end users the ability to edit and collaborate using a Web browser. Also new is Ajax editing capabilities for Internet maps, allowing for fast refreshes when scrolling due to the use of tiling and caching, which allows only new portions of unviewed map data to download on refresh versus the entire map.

With this new release of ILOG JViews, ILOG reinforces its commitment to providing one-stop shopping for high-end graphics and visualization tools, as its suite of products addresses all aspects of advanced visualization:

Key visual components are available: Diagrams, BPM, Dashboards, Maps, Charts, Gantt charts, Automatic Layout.
All kinds of deployment techniques are available, including: desktop clients, Ajax-enhanced web applications, Eclipse RCP, and Portals.

Through its Java, .NET and C++ graphics libraries and components, ILOG provides the industry’s most comprehensive set of graphics tools for creating sophisticated, interactive user displays. ILOG’s graphics products enhance decision making speed and ability by making vast quantities of complex data more comprehensible and manageable for users. With each of ILOG’s visualization products, developers can save 50 to 80 percent of development time in creating displays. For more information on the new products, please visit http://www.ilog.com/products/jviews. ILOG is a member of the OpenAjax Alliance and participates in several standards initiatives in the graphics world, including the World Wide Web Consortium’s scalable vector graphics standard committee where ILOG is a co-chair.