JGo for Java Customer Applications

The ASG software engineering team evaluated other visualization components — and even purchased a competing product — before discovering Northwoods Software.

“It was my disappointing experience with the competing product that compelled me to continue my search,” said Bill Sharar, ASG Senior Software Engineer in charge of the ASG-ManagerView product. “I am happy to say that JGo has been a pleasure to use from the very beginning.”

Sharar has a CAD programming background that would have enabled him to write a diagramming component in-house. However, in-house development would have added several months to the length of his project. By using JGo, he saved ASG many thousands of dollars in development costs alone.

“JGo’s object-oriented design made it simple to incorporate into my application,” said Sharar. “JGo has a common variant of the model-view-controller architecture where the view is also the controller. Simply adding the view to a Swing container makes JGo available for use. If no model is assigned to a view, a default empty model is lazily created when needed.”

Both model and view objects are capable of firing events off to objects that have registered themselves as listeners. ASG-ManagerView listens to the model events to synchronize graphical objects with repository content. It also has a property editor object that listens for object selection events from the view in order to display the properties of the currently selected graphical object(s).

“JGo classes are easy to extend,” said Sharar. “I have extended some of the basic JGo object classes to add a couple of shapes common in E/R diagrams and scalable, user-defined shapes. It was also a simple matter to change the behavior of the ASG-ManagerView node and link classes by extending the JGoArea and JGoLink classes, respectively.”

The JGo view also supports the Java Printing API, enabling implementation of a print preview that can handle multi-page printouts without much difficulty.

“All in all, my experience with JGo has been both productive and enjoyable,” said Sharar. “ASG-ManagerView was released several months ago and all is going smoothly. I am currently working on the next version – using JGo, of course.”

EMAGEFACTORY software facilitates the filling out of an electronic version of a business report / form. We needed a package that would allow for the placement of interactive text, signature, combo box, calendar, checkbox, and file chooser objects onto a SVG or raster image representation of a business form. We also needed to be able to create a form from lines, text, and shapes if no image representation of a form existed.

The built-in support for images, shapes, scrolling, drag-and-drop, selection, and resizing of objects were some of our initial reasons for choosing JGo. The JGo package is very well documented and easy to understand. There were also several simple examples included with the library that helped us get started using JGo. We were able to extend the JGo package to fit our needs in a fairly short amount of time.

We were very pleased with the support received from Northwoods Software. All our questions were answered without delay. We are certain that incorporating the JGo package into our product saved us a great deal of time and money in our development efforts. We found JGo to be an excellent solution for our requirements.

Script Workflow is the heart of Precision Response Corporation's customer relationship management (CRM) system - a specialized CRM for call center applications. Script Workflow dynamically manages the customer-to-agent representative interaction by guiding information exchange based on business rules or actions taken directly by a system user.

Increasingly, complex business rules call for a robust, maintainable business rule engine. Script Workflow is built as a J2EE-compliant application that combines the capabilities of a business rule engine with those existing in Precision Response Corporation's CRM engine. Script Workflow runtime engine is based on a relational database for supporting legacy CRM capabilities and an object-based database -stored in Precision Response Corporation's proprietary XML business rule format--for supporting more complex business rules.

It became apparent that, in order for Script Workflow to be successful, a highly visual maintenance interface had to be packaged with Script Workflow. The technical team proposed a JGo/web-based solution but lost the debate to the business team who favored a Visio/VBA client/server solution. We experienced problems early in the development of our software project, such as; licensing costs, security, timely obtaining of licenses, client side maintenance, deployment delays, Visio and VBA limitations and Visio's proprietary document data format.

The technical team was tasked with resolving the issues listed above. After Northwoods Software assured JGo's next release would support document storage in XML format, a JGo based solution was completed in close to three months. All of the issues identified were resolved with the JGo, version 4.1 implementation. The security issue was resolved by implementing a 3-tier solution using SOAP and proprietary XML over HTTP communications. Programming language limitations were overcome by moving to Java. Graphics roadblocks were removed by moving to JGo, version 4.1. The deployment issues were resolved by using the Java Network Launching Protocol (building the maintenance interface as a Java WebStart application); graphics data and Script Workflow data were decoupled by creating Script Workflow -specific JGo objects. And finally, Northwoods' JGo licensing is not an issue with web-based applications.

Furthermore, there was enough confidence in the quality of JGo libraries to base Script Workflow server-side processes on JGo document objects. Some of these advanced features are reverse engineering of data, data synchronization, import and export. JGo was more than the centerpiece technology in the success of Script Workflow, Northwoods support staff directly contributed to the success of the project.

Luis Untama
Software Architect
Precision Response Corporation

We have tested and are using the new JGo version 4.1. We see that you have made a lot of progress with your component with the addition of the new SVG support. The SVG support is a big time saving feature since it makes it redundant to develop complex methods for reading and generating XML for your graph storage. We also really appreciate all the additional new graphical features, updated manuals and demo applications. Combined, they represent a big step forward to the excellent technology of JGo and Northwoods Software.

We really like developing with the JGo toolkit, since it has such a huge feature set. Add to that, the facts that it comes with source code and your company's technical support team is so very knowledgeable and so quick to respond to all of our questions makes your component one of the best we've ever used.

Marco Koch
Technology Lead
SOLONDE (solutions on demand)