Products for Developers
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NetCharts Visualization Architecture
The NetCharts Visualization Architecture (NVA) describes a common infrastructure used across the NetCharts for Developers and NetCharts Performance Dashboards product lines. It enables Visual Mining to deliver comprehensive, intuitive, and effective visualization solutions. The NVA consists of four distinct elements: Rendering Engines; Content Template Languages; Data Access and Analytics Engine; and Interactive User Interfaces. Each element has been refined over the past 10 years and is incorporated into the NetCharts product line. NetCharts products are used by thousands of customers in a variety of data visualization and dashboard applications using their own data sources.
Rendering Engines - The NetCharts Rendering Engines represent the core of the NVA and are responsible for generating the graphical content displayed in NetCharts-based applications, reports, and dashboards. Separate rendering engines exist for generating charts, tables, and complete pages. The Visual Mining award-winning Chart Rendering Engines are capable of producing thousands of variations on 17 standard chart types. The NetCharts Table Rendering Engine uses NVA-specific Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) processing to produce richly formatted HTML tables. The NetCharts Page Rendering Engine produces complete dashboard and report pages, including common user interface controls such as pull-down menus, checkboxes, and radio buttons. The Page Engine is capable of producing pages in a variety of Web application programming languages, including Java, JSP, and ASP.NET.
Content Template Languages - The NVA includes three distinct Content Templating Languages developed by Visual Mining. These languages provide a simple, reusable mechanism for storing definitions of the data connections, charts, tables, and pages used to construct NetCharts-based applications, reports, and dashboards. In the NVA, details about data presentation are separated from the data and data analysis. This allows users to easily create and manage different customizable visualization styles for their data. Applications can be branded with multiple looks, and multiple applications can share a common presentation style. Content templates are readable by humans and can be edited in any text editor or IDE. For best effect, use NetCharts Designer, a purpose-built IDE that provides wizard-based point-and-click tools for creating NetCharts visualization templates.
Data Access and Analysis Engine - The Data Access and Analysis components of the NVA are responsible for interrogating data sources and analyzing the resultant data. The NVA supports interaction with all relational databases, XML files, CSV files, and with most legacy applications. More than 50 separate data analysis functions are available, including Six Sigma and statistical process control analysis. An extension point allows Java programmers to add their own custom data analysis to the NVA.
Interactive User Interfaces - Dynamic user interfaces top the NVA architecture and maximize the effectiveness of NetCharts-based applications, reports, and dashboards. Charts, graphs, and tables are drillable, with any valid Web URL as a drill target. Any element of a chart can serve as a launch point for a context-sensitive drill, allowing users to easily pinpoint items of interest. AJAX technology optimizes updates to individual components of complex dashboards, graphs, and reports. Rich, client-side GUIs present users with control over the content and design of their presentation layer, in the form of dashboards, reports, and pages.