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Graphing Libraries for Java?
Node and Edge asks: "Many interesting problem domains involve some form of graph-based or graph-like information: network activity visualizations; social software; workflow management; P2P software development; and version control with branching, just to name a few. It is notoriously difficult for people to visualize a graph structure - unless it happens to be a strictly hierarchical tree-like structure, such as what we know from file-system explorers. Now, with all of that said, what graph libraries can you recommend? The following criteria apply, though they're not absolute: Java or Java bindings; simple to use for simple applications; and polished, extensible UI components. I'm familiar with JGraph, JUNG, Prefuse, OpenJGraph, Tigris GEF, Eclipse GEF, Graphviz, but have not had a chance to evaluate them all. Have you used any of these extensively? If so, can you provide any constructive advice? If not, can you recommend something else, ?"
I guess I don't know the exact problem domain you are working with or what application environment you are looking to present graphs with... but server-side SVG generation has worked pretty well for us.
Check out Batik and see if it can fit your solution.
MORTAR COMBAT!
yEd is pretty good. It builds off the yFiles library.
My solution for graph visualization was to use Java to dump graphs in a DOT-format file for Graphviz, and then use dot/neato to generate SVG. It works pretty well - clean output, and reasonably fast for moderately-sized graphs in dot. (Neato is much slower).
I think there are two issue here: a data structure called by the name "graph" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(data_structur e)), and a means to visualize these structures.
A library could address one or both of these topics. The title of this article is therefore somewhat misleading (i.e. just focusing on the graphical display of a graph).
I drink the Java, I spill some on the table, then I graph the absorbance factor of the paper napkin.
Now if I could just stop the shakes and not being able to sleep, I'd be fine.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
- Open Source, Free
- Really Cool Looking Display
- Easy to add to
- Easy to use API
- Suited to my work ( Biology )
At the time we were using yFiles, but it has several problems. Mainly, it is pay-for-it software, and hard to extend (i.e. no Interfaces, Node and Edge are final, not Open Source, so no custom code was possible.) However, yFiles has better layout than anyone else in this field.After evaluating many packages (which are listed here) which include the ones you have listed. We decided that our needs were not met and built our own. (First one on the preceding link) The main thing that I needed was a flexable UI, for showing Multi-Dimensional Data, and support for subgraphs, in a way that makes lots of sense in how I work, but I am not sure if it is suitable elsewhere yet, or not.
The integrated software that uses my Graph Library is called Cytoscape and while still a work in progress is getting way better every release. In terms of the Graphing support, I think we are top notch, but we need to spend more time on algorithms and layouts
I will be checking this thread throughout the weekend, so please reply if I can be of more help. And thanks for getting this onto Slashdot! I hope that more people will becocem involved in graphing, and especially in making file formats standard
I've used JGraph and Graphviz very happily, and can recommend them ... but they do very different things. Can you feed us a couple of use cases, or user stories? A little narrative?
We use JFreeChart which works fine for us. We have fairly simple data to graph (a line chart with messages per second, bar charts for top spam and virus recipients) for the analysis summary in an email scanning product.
Katy Börner and I have been organizing a workshop on Information Visualization Infrastructures, including graph drawing packages. The results are available at http://vw.indiana.edu/ivsi2004/
There are lots of different tradeofs involved. One being interactive vs. static graphics. Another being the size of the graphs.
For static graphs, such as class hierarchies and such, Graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org/ works fine and is easy to integrate in a system. For some graphs, Graphviz will not work at all so you need to try first.
For large or dense graphs, above 1000 nodes or more than 4 times more edges than vertices (5n etc), node-link diagrams don't work at all. You could use a matrix but people are not used at reading matrices.
For interactive visualization of graphs, Jung (http://jung.sourceforge.net/) and Prefuse (http://prefuse.sourceforge.net/) are fine if you have small graphs ()
If you are a graph wizard and want to analyze large social networks, you can take a look at Pajek (http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/Pajek/) but it is not a free software and runs mostly on Windows.
Other packages are ok for simple things, stereotyped things or more experimental things. You need to try them on your own problem to decide.
Just wanted to point this out to anyone new to the area: The graphs being discussed are NOT something you can make in excel, which should really be called plots or charts (in this context). These are not pie charts, or XY scatter plots, there is no least-squares fitting to a Graph.
What is meant by a graph (in this context) is a collection of nodes (aka vertices) and edges (aka links) connecting those nodes. An example graph could be a friendship network: People are represent as nodes and an edge falls between two nodes when those two people are on a first name basis.
So Graph Visualization is not trivial at all. Very complex relationships are modelled as graphs and good software is important. I for one use the graphviz port on OS X (that won an apple developers award) after becoming thoroughly sickened with Pajek in windows!