Garret Buell wrote:
http://blog.thejit.org/?page_id=14
It's a "JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit" and it is neat.
Strangely enough my first thought was "man, it would be cool if shoes
had that". Anyone up for a port? I might have to take a crack at it
and make a github repo. Regardless, check it out.
Those graph displayers are essentially two layers - a geometry manager to
determine the node and edge layout - and a rendering layer.
I frequently use GraphViz as the geometry layer, like this:
- express data as nodes and their edges
- write them in .dot notation
- pipe them thru dot or neato
- read in the SVG output
- use XPath to read the node and edge locations
- render each node and edge into the View
With a little interactivity, your user interface can edit the nodes and edges,
and pipe them through dot again. The benefit of GraphViz is graph layout is a
sick topic - which is why some websites are very careful about which screenshots
they let out. GraphViz provides camera-ready artwork, competitive with PDF, and
it has all the "knobs" we would need to set the leading, kerning, gutters,
ranks, etc.
--
Phlip
