JIDE 2.8.0 and JIDE Charts

After several months of hard work and with the help from many beta customers, we are pleased to announce the first formal release of JIDE Charts: a new powerful and flexible charting package that can help the users of your application to understand and explore their data as well as seeing it attractively presented. It supports many different chart types including line charts, scatter charts, bar charts, pie charts, gauges, even candlestick charts. You can see some screenshots over here. As you would expect, it embraces the model-view-controller pattern and has been designed so that you can easily switch from one visual paradigm to another - like switching from a bar chart to a pie chart - with minimal coding effort. As with JTable, the model layer is defined as an interface - which allows for custom implementations when advanced functionality is required - while the default implementation saves time and is very easy to use.

JIDE Charts supports axes for the display of numerical, time-series or categorical data. The concept of a category is very powerful because a Category instance can be created from any object - they do not have to be Strings or enums. So not only can you use an axis to display qualitative values (for example cold, tepid, warm, hot) but also to differentiate between different individuals in a model-driven coding effort. Axes are defined independently, so you can plot a numerical axis against time-series values, categorical against categorical, or any combination you choose.

The visual appearance of charts is highly customizable with choice of colors, shapes and sizes or custom renderers. However, we have already designed some great looking renderers: the points of an XY plot can be rendered as shiny spheres, the bars of a bar chart can be displayed as glossy cylinders or 3d blocks; and a pie chart can be shown in a 3D style. You can easily switch on the intuitive data exploration gesture of zooming and panning with the mouse - all it takes is a single line of code. JIDE Charts supports multiple y axes and has special provision for displaying large datasets without the usual performance drawbacks. It even supports curve fitting for easily discovering the trends in data.

We are very excited about this powerful new product and, with all these features, we think you will like it too.

JIDE Charts is part of JIDE Ultimate Suite. You can purchase JIDE Ultimate Suite to get it. Or you can purchase JIDE Charts as a standalone product. Or. As usual, existing JIDE Ultimate Suite customers will get the license of JIDE Charts for free. However you still need to send us an email to get an updated license key. For more pricing information, you can visit here.

In addition to JIDE Charts, we also add several nice features to this release.

A better column resize mode for JTables

JTable has a setAutoResizeMode method which can be used to determine how the columns are resized when the table is resized. However comparing with native table widgets on Windows or Mac OS X, none of the five existing resize modes work exactly right. The problem is the header doesn't expand all the way to cover the whole view port. See the first screenshot below. To solve this issue, we added yet another resize mode - AUTO_RESIZE_FILL. If you use this mode, you will get the same resize mode as a native table. Thanks Ken Orr for sharing the idea in his blog and permission to allow us using his idea.

Another way doing auto-filtering

We had AutoFilterTableHeader for a long time to support auto-filter feature. It uses a combobox-like drop down list on a table header to select the filtering criteria. However, we received many requests asking us to allow user type the filtering criteria using a text field. We can't do it using a table header as people still wants the familiar table header as it is. So in this release, we introduced a new way to support auto-filter feature by adding a special row to the table header area below the regular table header. You can check out AutoFilterTableDemo to see it in action.

JIDE Software, Inc.
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