InfiView 1.0: An AJAX graphics work in progress

Two products emerged from MB Technologies in May: Version 3.0 of Bindows, MB's AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) toolkit, and InfiView 1.0, a software platform for developing interactive, dynamic graphical maps and diagrams for the Web. Their commonalities don't end at their release date: InfiView is based on Bindows and thus shares both its strengths and its weaknesses.

Like Bindows -- which Test Center contributor Peter Wayner reviewed last November -- InfiView uses an XML-based markup language with embedded JavaScript that's normally launched from an HTML page. In spirit, this markup language is similar to Microsoft's XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language); it lacks, however, the same level of design and development tool support.

Bindows 3.0 includes unified vector graphics support, producing either SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) or VML (Vector Markup Language) depending on the browser; it also adds charts and gauges. InfiView builds on that foundation with a JavaScript class library that implements viewports, edges, nodes, events, actions, tools, automatic node layouts, and viewport navigators. You can embed any Bindows component in an InfiView application.

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InfiView comes with a wizard that can produce the basic shell of a whole family of Web design applications. If you want to develop a Web page that can be used to design networks or organization charts, the InfiView wizard can give you a credible starting point in a matter of minutes. Adding actions and extending the application is harder and more time-consuming, as you're basically editing XML and JavaScript using generic tools, supported by minimal documentation.

If your application doesn't fit the designer paradigm of an InfiView wizard page, your hope would be that InfiView's developers have supplied something similar as a demo application, which you can copy and modify. Several demos are available on the InfiView site and in the SDK. InfiView has some built-in support for the Google Maps API, but sadly, two demos and a short white paper are currently the only documentation for this.

My biggest difficulty with InfiView came from the relatively immature documentation. I don't mind browsing a class hierarchy, but I would really like an overview of the architecture and a structured introduction to using the classes. I'd also like to see a lot more samples, and better documented ones, at that.

My second biggest difficulty with InfiView came from the lack of tools. I do have several XML editors that I was able to use on InfiView XML files, but I felt "alone and afraid in a world I never made" trying to work with unfamiliar XML tags, namespaces, and JavaScript classes. I found myself yearning for the familiar comforts of Visual Studio or Eclipse and wishing for tag and code completion, not to mention context-sensitive help.