This software is a viewer for MS Visio documents in XML format, in which all the functions are coded in Java language so that it is platform-independent, and are encapsulated into a component so that the software can easily be integrated with any other Java-based application. Of course, the component can also be programmed as an individual application which serves as a pure Viewer for MS Visio XML Documents, in a platform-independent way.

This software mainly consists of 5 parts:

1) A Parser for Visio XML documents. Based on the XML Schema for MS Visio, it can read and analyze the components and objects in a Visio XML document;
2) A Convertor. By abandoning some components and objects in a Visio document which are generally unuseful for the output processing such as the ICON objects, and by carrying on other converting tasks to reduce the depth of document tree, the convertor can generate a new document with the compressed size, improved parsing efficiency, and enhanced convenience for dispatching and delivering on the network, compared to the original document;
3) A Library which encapsulates the necessary meta-graph objects. The Objects in the library are corresponding with those in the original Visio document structure, but are reconstructed with Java.
4) A Palette Library which encapsulates the objects to carry out the output processing for different devices, such as screen, printer or plotter, and other objects to make some transformation such as drag & drop, translation, rotation, shear, zooming and symmetric.
5) An Interface Repository, which includes the document-interface objects, event-interface objects, coordinates-interface objects and palette-interface objects. They can be used to realize the integration with other Java-based applications.

Visio is an important component of Microsoft Office Suite, which has a tremendous amount of users and has produced a huge amount of documents all around the world.