So I’m not sure how stackoverflow friendly this question is since it doesn’t have a quick clear cut answer but here we go…
I have a java program that generates data for a directed graph. Now I need to render this graph. The data needs to be laid out in 3D, and I want to be able to define which plane an edge lives in. (Each edge will only need to occupy 1 plane of the 3D space). I also need the ability to navigate around the graph. Since I know that this kind of stuff is hard, I’m going shopping.
So far I’ve looked into (In no particular order):
- JUNG: lacks 3D support
- Cytoscape: not sure how much I’ll be able to define edge drawing, haven’t seen a non bio-informatics application of it yet
- JGraph: I didn’t see any 3D applications yet
- Perfuse: looks promising, does anyone know anything else about it?
- Gephi: Documentation looks scarce
- Processing: does this play well with java?
I’m also considering doing some combination of opengl + swing rendering to create a 3D graph from multiple 2D graphs.
I am also not adverse to the idea of linking from another language
Any Ideas? Thank you.
I would recommend using Java3D for the visualization part
Java 3D Tutorial Introduces the concepts
Download Site contains the libraries and a few demo projects, for a quick start.
To do the layout of your graph you could look for an algorithms in JUNG and check whether the can be easily extended to 3D.
JUNG layout demo