Visualization

I was fiddling with the Netbeans Visual Library again, trying to show a complex graph on screen and I run into a problem: There were so many connection in the graph that some widgets were hard to read because the ConnectionWidget arrows were printed over them. So I tried to I try to rearrange the order of my LayerWidgets to paint the LabelWidgets on top of ConnectionWidgets. A call to mainLayer.bringToFront() should be enough, but this is what I got when I tried that: ...

I just came up with the idea of reproducing the GraphView demo I saw in prefuse by using the Netbeans Visual Library API. The GraphView demo uses a Force Directed Layout algorithm to dinamically position the nodes on the screen. It’s really fast and cool. Download prefuse and experiment with it by yourself. I wanted to achieve something similiar with the Visual Library and I succeed up to a point. The force based layout algorithm that I implemented is much simpler that the used in prefuse, so there is no spring-like movement. It looks way cooler with springs. It just uses repulsion between nodes and attraction between connected nodes. ...

I continue looking for graph visualization software. I rn into prefuse. Looks promising, take a look into the gallery to see some examples. But it’s still only a toolkit so it means that I have to develop at least a little application to be able to visualize my graph. I tried using the examples that come with prefuse and they work but they are not enough. I just converted my data to GraphML and I was able to load it into the GraphView example. But I need to add some functionality to it before I can actually use it to analyze my graph. I’m not sure I can use prefuse to print out the graph anyway so I’m giving up for a while. This graph thing it’s taking too much time, but I will try to come back to it some day.

After spending a bunch of time with the graphviz utilities (neato, dot, circo and twopi) trying to create a graph to understand the software dependencies between modules in a project I’ve been I assigned I realized that those tools don’t work well with large graphs. I tried and tried with no luck, I thought that the old linux kernel map poster used graphviz to create the poster but after googling a bit and reading the code for the FCGP project I found that they write PostScript directly. I was looking for something simpler. ...