pretty pictures
So the past couple of days at work, I've been working on a small data visualisation project. In the course of searching for things to help me out, I've found some pretty nifty stuff.
Many Eyes is a really cool service for doing visualisation. The obvious problem is that, if what you want to do is for work, then you probably can't hand over your data to IBM.
I've found a couple of Java toolkits that look pretty good. Prefuse has some pretty swanky examples built on top of it, and JUNG looks to be fairly nice. (I ended up going with JUNG just because I've got a limited amount of time, and I was able to find documentation on how to do weighted graphs in it much faster than I could find that for Prefuse.)
These toolkits are nice, but they're still toolkits. You have to do all the swing programming yourself to draw the final graphs, and I'm not a swing programmer by any stretch of the imagination. What I really would like is a pluggable framework that would let me write a plugin that would read in my data and turn it into a graph, which the framework would then know how to render. The framework could even have options to let you choose various visualisations of your graph, all without your having to know anything about swing. Man, that would be cool.
Many Eyes is a really cool service for doing visualisation. The obvious problem is that, if what you want to do is for work, then you probably can't hand over your data to IBM.
I've found a couple of Java toolkits that look pretty good. Prefuse has some pretty swanky examples built on top of it, and JUNG looks to be fairly nice. (I ended up going with JUNG just because I've got a limited amount of time, and I was able to find documentation on how to do weighted graphs in it much faster than I could find that for Prefuse.)
These toolkits are nice, but they're still toolkits. You have to do all the swing programming yourself to draw the final graphs, and I'm not a swing programmer by any stretch of the imagination. What I really would like is a pluggable framework that would let me write a plugin that would read in my data and turn it into a graph, which the framework would then know how to render. The framework could even have options to let you choose various visualisations of your graph, all without your having to know anything about swing. Man, that would be cool.