I searched the net for quite some time but couldn’t find this.. Perhaps this forum might have ideas?
What I need is to visualize in a form of a diagram some network system. Particularly – the irrigation system with a bunch of nodes organized as network, with containers, relations etc. I stumble upon fairly complex and expensive libraries with math graph theories in the core.. quite scary stuff. I’ve tried graph-like libraries, but they can’t make a humanized picture, all those graph algorithms aren’t very useful in my case. I don’t mind laying it out programmatically with a proper API.
I’m in java desktop apps (swing), if you know of anything or did something similar, please share. Actually could be a good idea for a product – XML structure in – live diagram out. Again, there are lots of complex projects out there, but nothing simple and straightforward for a simple task like showing you the structure of your system without spending thousands of hours to learn the tool. Open source solutions are very welcome, but commercial are OK too. Please share if you have real first hand experience with similar tasks.
I have developed applications with JUNG and prefuse. Both offered a variety of options for layout and visual customization (there are some fantastic demos/examples along with source code for both). They are both very approachable to use.
It is worth noting that prefuse hasn’t had a major update since 2008, and the last update for JUNG was early last year.