(SYS-CON Media) - ILOG 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).