Hello Oscar,
I am very glad to see you interested in this.
> Is there a design plan for adding graphs to visad?
Well, I am contemplating to do so, but I do not have a real plan yet. I am
eager to discuss this.
> I am curious how you
> plan to factor out the layout from the rendering of graphs, given that it
> is so tied to domain-specific constraints.
I plan to do it in a way, that the rendering is not concerned with the
layout, it receives data from the layouter(s) and maps it to
DisplayRealTypes. (I would like to stick to Visad's existing renderers.) I
am pretty new to visad, so I wonder if you are concerned with performance of
such a probably naive approach.
> Will there be a set of common
> graph-layout algorithms as well as a java interface for providing a layout
> algorithm?
Hopefully. In the next days I will try to make the simple but effective
TouchGraph (http://touchgraph.sf.net) layout code work with a visad 3d
example, just to get a feel for it.
My final goal is to have a linear arithmetic constraint solver (like the
great Cassowary
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/cassowary/) play along
with various layouting algorithms concurrently. This would allow for an
interesting mix of strict and loose layouting strategies - and probably it's
a benefit for the design because this requires a very abstracted notion of
the domain objects, so the systems (graph layout, solver, visad) can play
together.
I will post on this list, when there's something working. If you have ideas
please, by all means, post them, so we can discuss.
Yours,
Manuel
