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1) My company is very concerned about the distribution and intellectual property restrictions that can come with using some types of open source software. I understand there can be restrictions on us even if we use a product that embeds such open source code. Many of your competitors use restrictive open source licenses. Should I be concerned about this when using ILOG JViews?
This is an important question, especially for our independent software vendor (ISV) customers. We assure you that ILOG JViews has passed the strict licensing guidelines of the world's largest ISVs and can likely pass your requirements too.
If you still have concerns, please contact an ILOG sales representative to get ILOG's open source code usage policy, and to ask other related questions.
2) Why do companies choose JViews Charts when there are so many other options available?
There are many business reasons companies choose JViews Charts over other choices. Some of those reasons are described on the follwing pages:
Businesses usually select JViews Charts when they require high performance, a high degree of control over the user interface or if they have specialized Web client needs.
- High performance—The ability to handle large sets of data (to redraw updates on the display or to use very little CPU time to draw.
- Control over the look and feel—Developers have full access to an extremely well-documented software development kit (SDK) and can control every aspect of the display. Changing the interface, even during runtime, is also very easy and doesn’t require coding.
- Specialized Web client requirements— JViews Charts provides thin clients that can be deployed with a high degree of user interactivity and can be efficiently updated.
3) What’s the difference between a scalable vector graphics (SVG) thin client and a DHTML thin client?
SVG is an open World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for exchanging vector graphics information. Web browsers can display SVG information either with a plug-in or natively on Firefox. SVG functions much like Flash, except that it is an open standard, XML format. Using DHTML thin clients is the standard bitmap-based approach. With an SVG client, the server pushes vector descriptions to the client.
The advantage of DHTML and bitmaps is that every browser supports them natively; recent advances in AJAX allow updates to be made more efficiently. Typically, however, when it is necessary to make a change to the entire chart—such as when zooming or when the data changes—the entire bitmap must be regenerated on the server and sent to the client.
The advantage of SVG is that such updates can be made more efficiently. A real-time stock chart, for example, can receive incremental updates as small SVG (XML) files and then locally redraw only a portion of the
chart display. This makes the SVG approach more efficient for displays that require a high degree of interactivity or frequent updates.
4) Do you support 3D rendering and data sets?
JViews Charts supports 3D rendering but not 3D data sets. Like Excel, JViews allows users to plot multiple parallel sets of data. JViews goes further than Excel, however, giving the end user fine control over the viewing angle, lighting, and more—even at runtime.
Note that very few applications have to use true 3D data sets. These are commonly found in scientific applications, where the surfaces of 2D arrays must be visualized. In most cases, users only want to explore the relationships between vectors—3D rendering allows them to do that and is sufficient for this purpose.
5) Does the JViews Charts package include a JViews Gantt display?
No, but alternatively the JViews Charts package is included with the purchase of the JViews Gantt package.
6) I see you provide a treemap chart in the JViews Charts package. For what applications are treemaps used?
Treemaps are used for visualizing large sets of data in order to detect outliers or trends and to visualize the relationships between different parameters in a set of data. With treemaps, users can assign various visual attributes to different bands of data in the data set, helping the human eye detect complex patterns and relationships.
A good example of how treemaps are applied to applications with large data sets is SmartMoney's Map of the Market. It is used to visualize the performance of over 500 stocks simultaneously. Each rectangle represents a stock value whose size represents its market capitalization. See also Peet’s Coffee.
7) Are real-time updates for JViews Charts available?
The availability of real-time updates for JViews Charts depends on your definition of the term “real time” and your deployment strategy. The term real time is relative to the application and the deployment strategy depends on the underlying technology, as well as network bandwidth.
JViews Charts have been used in a critical patient monitoring desktop application at hospitals, where 30 frames per second was essential. Such refresh rates would not be possible on thin browser clients. JViews Charts offers multiple options for deploying efficient charts on the Web, including incremental updates on SVG charts that reduce network traffic and minimize screen repaints.
8) Can I customize how JViews Charts looks?
Yes. JViews Charts 7.5 allows end users to use a subset of Designer for Charts. Application developers can configure a dialog box that allows end users to decide exactly how the chart will be displayed. These parameters can be stored as user preferences.
9) How do I connect a chart to data?
JViews Charts provides pre-built data connectors to its data model for Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), flat files, in-memory and XML. Using any of the pre-built connectors is easy— users can define the connection through Designer for Charts without writing any code.
The Java SDK allows users to programmatically define the data connection and even derive new types.
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