Graph Visualization in a Eclipse RCP aplication

Question

I am working on an Eclipse RCP application which should display an internal hierarchical structure as a graph. The nodes of the graph should be positioned on different points of a background image but should offer drag support. The graph should be zoom-able possibly without resizing the nodes on the maps (layout zoom) while the background image should be scaled normally. Some kind of semantic zoom (showing and hiding sub nodes on request) should be possible. Which library or tool would be suitable to solve this problem?

Update: The graph should be displayed similar to an UML class diagram.

Answer 1

As far as I know: EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) and GMF (Graphical Modelign Framework) are best well-known frameworks to do that.

Answer 2

Best bet would be Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) http://www.eclipse.org/gef/. As it highly integrates into eclipse and includes a 2d visualization library.

As for third-party libraries:

Either prefuse or processing.org are java-based which can be used for graph-based visualization. You should wrap either org.prefuse for prefuse or wrap processing.core for processing as a standalone osgi plugin for a better version-maintenance.

I'd recommend you look at http://code.google.com/p/uofs-silver-hg/ as it is a system that integrated prefuse in her workspace.

I also recommend you look at gephi graph toolkit http://gephi.org/toolkit/ as your problem may involve large-scale information processing.

Answer 3

You could use Structure101. It will give you the hierarchical graphs which you can export and then manually overlay on your graphic. In fact, you can grab package-level graphs from a s101 repository using an url so I guess you could maybe construct what you're looking for in html...

Cheers.

Answer 4

JUNG is the best Graph vis package I've seen to date.

jung.sourceforge.net

Super flexible and you can pretty much cusomize everything.

Cheers.

Answer 5

I guess the term graph is confusing. Your description suggests a travelling salesman or or class diagram style graph, instead of a earning for the last quarter style graph. I think you are looking for something along the lines of GUESS or Zest.

Answer 6

JFreeChart does most (maybe even all, it is a very comprehensive tool) of what you list, It is simply embeddable in Eclipse. See the Eclipse-CS plugin for example usage.