Plugins :: Blog :: Playing with GraphGear

September 21, 2007

Playing with GraphGear

Hi Guys,

I've been trying out Graph Gear. It's really fun but my problem is that nodes tend to be too close and overlap each other. Do we have ActionScript hackers here? Or anybody here who can suggest an alternative to Graph Gear?

Graph Gear is open source (see here). Here's a demo on Elgg (source code).

I'm now tempted to do it with GraphViz instead.

Keywords: graph gear, graphviz, mindmap

Posted by JP Loh @ Plugins

Comments

You may also like to try the Vizaviz plugin based on the Prefuse Java applet.
You should be able to download Vizaviz from the Elgg Plugins SVN repository, but the web interface does not seem to be working correctly at the moment.

Geoffrey Rowland on Friday, 21 September 2007, 11:35 UTC # |
Thanks! I'll try to access the SVN repo. BTW, I'm trying to avoid Java because it tends to take a while to load and eats more resources compared to Flash.

JP Loh on Wednesday, 26 September 2007, 07:56 UTC # |
You can also download the visaviz tarball from:
http://www.alia.org.uk/~sven/elgg/viewvc/viewvc.py/plugins/vizualisation/mod/
Just unpack it and place in your elgg/mod/ directory
Will be interested in your progress with non-Java alternatives for visualising social networks. Good luck!

Geoffrey Rowland on Thursday, 27 September 2007, 22:01 UTC # |
I get an error when I click the "Download GNU tarball" link.

JP Loh on Tuesday, 09 October 2007, 04:59 UTC # |
Downloading packages from the svn respository needs fixing, we're working on it. It's a nice plugin you have created, if you would like to have this included in the plugin repository, send a message to misja(at)curverider(dot)co(dot)uk.

News on Friday, 26 October 2007, 10:22 UTC # |
Hi JP, and anyone else interested in Elgg network visualisation.
Just reporting that, in my hands, your Map plugin (Graph Gear-based using ActionScript 2) works 'out of the box' with Elgg 0.9 rc2
The Visaviz plugin (Prefuse-based Java applet) only seems to work up to Elgg 0.8.x, though I suspect it won't take much to fix it for Elgg 0.9.
Have also noticed that Flare, an ActionScript 3 visualisation toolkit based on Prefuse, has recently been released. Perhaps Flare will provide a good route to develop/converge the Map and Prefuse plugins to improve perfomance, usability and functionality.
It would be nice to have a graphical network interface to Elgg so that, for example, you could select a friend's node and be taken to their profile, recent blogs etc.
Perhaps something for Elgg 1.0?
Seasons greetings
Geoff

Geoffrey Rowland on Saturday, 22 December 2007, 15:49 UTC # |