Home    Services    People    Process        More About Us

Drawlets

Did you ever think that your application should offer more than you can get from typical widgets that are basically fancy ways of entering text? Many applications need truly graphical representation to display and manipulate information. You realize that adding spinning coffee cups may be cool, but it's just fluff. You don't want to use graphics just to look cool. Lack of value is remembered long after coolness is forgotten. But how do you add real graphical content to your applications? Drawlets may be just what you need.

Figure 1: Ugly marketing bitmap made with Drawlets for IBM VisualAge® catalog and firewalls that don't allow Java.

Drawlets is not just a drawing tool, but a framework for building graphical applications (or portions of applications that are inherently graphical). It is especially appropriate for diagramming but has been used for a variety of other applications.

Although many of the concepts behind this framework were born in the mid-80s (see background), this is not just an old idea rewritten in Java. It has been engineered using Patterns for Building an Unusually Adaptable Java Framework to be used in a wide variety of domains and applications, taking advantage of many of the features of the Java Language and the more adaptable parts of the available libraries.

Of course it is simple to say all this, but how do you know it's true? Download it and examine it for yourself. It is free for evaluation and educational purposes. If you want to make it part of your internal or external product, contact us for licensing options and prices.

The latest version of this product is being developed using VisualAge® for Java and will have some extensions for better integration with VisualAge® for Java. However, it will not be tied to that IDE. It is intended to be 100% pure Java.

More Information

Drawlets User's Guide
Patterns for Drawlets
More Background on Drawlets

Customer Testimonials

"Intelliun makes a development and integration platform that accelerates the delivery of large-scale enterprise-level Internet-ready business systems. We evaluated Drawlets for use as the graphical framework behind The Virtual Enterprise (VE)/Designer* , our product suite's visual modeling environment. Compared to other options, we found Drawlets to offer the best value in terms of feature, function, and cost. Its design is flexible and the framework was easy to implement."

– Jeanne Sebring, Chief Technology Officer, Intelliun Corporation. Click here to see how Intelliun has implemented the drawlets framework. (2MB animated gifs)

This is what one alpha customer said:

"In about 15 minutes, the Drawlets Framework was up and running in my development environment. I was immediately able to run the examples utilizing the framework and I soon discovered how easy it was to add Drawlets' functionality to the application I was developing. When I needed to extend the framework to perform some application specific tasks, I was pleasantly surprised to find the hooks I required already in place.

Drawlets works and it's extremely stable.

Drawlets' extensive use of interfaces allowed me to write a great deal of generic code throughout my application without concerns for underlying implementations.

The project was exciting for me because I had never before added drawing capabilities to an application. I thought it would be difficult and time consuming. I am still amazed how easy it was with Drawlets."

– Duff O'Melia, Kameo Corporation

Demo Applets

To give you a slight preview of what can be done with Drawlets, we have provided four example applets:

• FullScrollingApplet
• FullApplet
• SimpleApplet
• SimplestApplet

There are two types of GraphNode examples that we think are pretty neat (in their simplicity). They show what you can do even without a tool palette:

• GraphNodeExample
• ArrowGraphNodeExample

Ready to download to see what else you can do with it?

Download Latest Version

It is written using JDK 1.2 and the zipped version is only 623k (or 517k for VAJ).

• Standard download includes the classes, code and documentation (623k)
• VisualAge for Java users can download the zip with a repository (517k)

If you are using VA make sure to put the image files in correct project_resources directory for your project. Don't forget to make sure the "com.rolemodelsoft" directory/folder is in your CLASSPATH environment variable.

Commercial Use Pricing

Drawlets is priced quite differently from many software frameworks. There is no charge to use the software for development or education, but you may not distribute it for other purposes. Think of it as an ongoing evaluation license. When your evaluation ends with a decision to use it in an industrial or commercial application, you may purchase a distribution license to enable you to distribute the software or its derivatives in binary form as follows:

* All prices in US Dollars.
All distribution licenses include free upgrades to future versions for one year from purchase date.
One year support contracts available thereafter at 40% of purchase price.

Server licenses and source code distribution license proposals are evaluated on a case by case basis.