Tom Sawyer Perspectives, Java Edition

Releases

Release 2.0.0

DateJuly 8, 2010
StatusGeneral

Overview

Tom Sawyer Perspectives now supports web application deployment. You can design your applications once within Tom Sawyer Perspectives Designer and then deploy them to web or desktop applications.

In addition, the visualization and layout architectures have been optimized to improve performance. Layout speed has increased by twenty to sixty percent.

New

Installation

  • Support for license server connection through a web proxy server

Web Interfaces

  • Client Integration
    • Support for most Java web application frameworks
    • Simple HTML tags embed views and other components in web applications
    • GWT component libraries enable integration with GWT applications
    • Advanced AJAX calls minimize page refresh and ensure excellent performance
    • Flexible JavaScript functions invoke custom commands using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
  • Display Components
    • Drawing view
    • Inspector view
    • Table view
    • Tree view
    • Overview window
    • Coordinated view updates
    • Tab and split panels for use in web applications
    • Scroll and zoom control panel in drawing views
    • Customizable CSS for views and display components
    • A variety of tree cell and table cell renderer and editor types
    • Print setup dialog
    • Print preview
    • Multipage printing
  • Interactivity
    • Toolbars and context menus
    • Viewing tools include select, pan, marquee zoom, zoom in, zoom out, and zoom fit
    • Editing tools create and move objects and create inter-object associations

Model

  • Attribute values can be computed from expressions using functions or other attributes
  • Attribute values can be synchronized with graphical element properties

Data Integration

  • The XML integrator supports namespaces
  • Data source locale specifications
  • Data source text encoding specifications

Layout

  • Threaded layout
  • Layout cancel
  • Layout animation for desktop applications
  • Drawing Fitting optimizes use of the drawing canvas or printed page
  • Open and closed group constraints

Documentation

  • Descriptions and images for layout options online help
  • Tutorials for GWT and HTML client integration
  • Instructions for staging on several popular application servers
  • Additional examples in biological ontology, networking, and process design

Improvements

Installation

  • Improved installation program
  • Improved licensing setup

Technology

  • Improved application internationalization
  • Improved support for the Apple Mac OS X user interface

Designer

  • Revamped integrator definition dialog boxes
  • New icons to indicate web and desktop feature availability
  • Enabled setting root drawing layout properties
  • Updated and refined default toolbar for drawing views
  • Added JDBC connection templates for Ingres, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, PostgreSQL, and Sybase databases
  • Customized color chooser to enable choosing colors with transparency
  • Improved file chooser behavior

Layout

  • All layout
    • Increased layout speed by twenty to sixty percent
    • Animated threaded and unthreaded operations
    • Improved drawing layout with fewer interdrawing edge crossings
  • Circular layout
    • Improved edge labeling with dense drawings
    • Enhanced clustering quality
    • Refined clustering options
    • Enhanced multiedge routing
  • Hierarchical layout
    • Enhanced incremental layout results
    • Reduced number of edge crossings
    • Improved edge labeling with orthogonal and polyline routing
  • Orthogonal layout
    • Reduced local edge crossings
    • Refined labeling
    • Enhanced group constraint quality
    • Improved node placement with fixed connectors
    • Improved edge labeling
  • Symmetric layout
    • Improved edge labeling with dense drawings
    • Enhanced multiedge routing
    • Improved node placement with fixed connectors
    • Enhanced handling of fixed point constraints
  • Routing
    • Reduced edge crossings with orthogonal routing
    • Significantly enhanced orthogonal edge routing with connectors
  • Labeling
    • Increased quality

System Requirements

  • These operating systems have been added:
    • Apple Mac OS X 10.6
    • Microsoft Windows 7
    • Microsoft Windows Server 2008
    • Red Hat Linux 5
  • These operating systems have been dropped:
    • Apple Mac OS X 10.4
    • Red Hat Linux 4
    • SUSE Linux 10
    • Ubuntu 7.10
  • These application servers have been added:
    • Apache Tomcat 6.0
    • IBM WebSphere 7.0
    • Oracle WebLogic Server 11g
    • Red Hat JBoss 5.1
  • These browsers have been added:
    • Apple Safari 4.0 and 5.0
    • Google Chrome 4.0 and 5.0
    • Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and 8.0
    • Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6

Fixes

  • Date and time settings are compatible with various locales

Issues

  • With Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Vista, JDK 6.0 does not support Windows XP Compatibility Mode