Seven years ago a new JViews module, named Diagrammer, introduced for the first time a CSS engine that manages the graphic object creation and customization based on model state. Since then the CSS technology has been extended to other JViews modules. Outside ILOG, this technology is adopted for almost all languages related to RIA and web applications.

The Designer tools eased the user experience to create style sheets, attracting more and more customers to the CSS path. In JViews 8.0 came the symbol, a black box containing CSS that manages a complex graphic representation as a whole. The symbol interacts with its environment through “parameters”, just like a procedure call. A Symbol Editor offers a GUI to create the symbol in an interactive environment.

What we called “the toolchain” contains so far the Symbol Editor, the Diagrammer Designer, and the Dashboard Editor. This toolchain leverages on symbols to create high value diagrams and dashboards made with interactive symbols. Note that this toolchain was possible only because the symbols are interpreted on the fly by a runtime environment flexible enough to allow edit and use in the same session.

Now in JViews 8.5 we added in the toolchain the Symbol Compiler to return to the Java world. The compiler actually translates a symbol into a java class with the same behavior. The gain is obviously performance, but also flexibility (symbols as java classes can be edited and subclassed for advanced uses).

The loop is closed. JViews now provides a powerful development environment that eventually generates a java class representing a sophisticated graphical component, dynamically customizable through parameters and fully interactive.

Posted by Philippe Kaplan in CSS, Diagrammer, Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.