Abstract

This thesis focuses on the design of interfaces and the implementation of a component-based data visualization framework for the Win32 platform. This framework consists of eleven libraries. A component based object-oriented design and implementation approach is presented for building this data visualization framework. The design and implementation are based on the Microsoft COM concepts, which provide a way for software components to communicate with each other and reuse of binary code without "implementation inheritance" problems, from which the traditional object-oriented design methodologies suffer. The methods and properties of a component object are exposed through its interface(s). Any component object that implements a new visualization algorithm can be added into this framework as a "black box". And any new library, which can run on a different platform as long as that platform supports COM and it follows COM rules, can be added into this framework. Due to using COM technologies, a visualization application can be built easily and quickly by using this framework and any programming language that supports arrays of function pointers.