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The flash thingy is really neat: There is a demo of this free library.

The flash thingy is really neat: There is a demo of this free library.

Take a look at Prefuse. I haven't used it myself (I considered it for a project), but it may have the right mix of a good Java API and flexibility/customizability that you're looking for. As a bonus, it's BSD licensed. YMMV. Good luck.

In the Complexity Map, a slightly similar approach, a treemap is used to visualize the code's namespace hierarchy in a 2d-landscape. Results from code metric tools are layed out in the treemap, either for individual metrics (e.g. cyclomatic complexity) or for aggregated metrics (anthing that influences team productivity; e.g. errors that are not logged). Due to the Prefuse-based seamless zooming, combined with drill down functionality, it's really easy to visualize and investigate hotspots in extremely large codebases.

The website contains some more background and a nice interactive demo. If you have the patience to wait for the applet to load, I'll guarantee you you'll like it.

Disclaimer: I am the author of this tool. The website mentions commercial interest, but to be honest: there's hardly any. I've found that the concept is just too difficult to sell over the web, so I'll probably open source it soon.

Not that I want to run them out of a patent (if they TRULY deserve it), but I think most decent programmers might be able to effect the same results with existing code and some head-banging on the wall.

Yes, I think so too. Get started :)

CC.

I've been amazed by the Prefuse.org open source visualization project and its Vizster subproject. My only sadness is it's still beta.

From the site: "Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes."

The article is a little short, I would have liked more more more!! :-)

May I suggest Information Architecture from Peter Morville. He is also co-founder and president of the Information Architecture Institute.

May I also suggest taking a look at Prefuse, an open source project to interactively vizualize organized information (still in beta however).