WidgetKit/BusinessGraphics is a class library for VisualAge for Smalltalk development that makes it easy to include all kinds of graphical charts and tables in your application. A folder of parts installs onto your Composition Editor palette from Load Features. You also get a Transcript menu item to bring up a set of sample uses of the parts.

The product was quite solid, once I got onto the latest release (for VAST 3.0b). Earlier versions crashed fairly often. Product support was very responsive to my problem report calls, with one exception: I reported a "minor" refresh error and never received a resolution to the problem.

The product comes with examples. In fact, I used the "Object Aware Graph" example as the starting point for my application. The most difficult part of the effort had nothing directly to do with the product itself - I had to build a chart object that had a fair amount of intelligence in order to allow for multiple histograms to be displayed, double click actions on bars, and zooming based on selection and/or numeric entries. If you don't have this much functionality to build in, you won't have all the legwork to keep track of this. Be clear though, WidgetKit/BusinessGraphics handles the graphics part, leaving you with the mapping to your business data to do yourself.

Documentation was good, but I did have to search at times for information I thought was rather key to using the product. Overall, I was happy with the product and would recommend it to VisualAge users.

Scores: (1=poor, 5=excellent)
Functionality:
Robustness:
Ease of use:	½
Documentation:	½
Support:

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