It’s one of those afternoons again where I am loosing myself in doing some research on graph tools. Maybe I can spare some others an afternoon of browsing around and summarize some things I found:

• kgraphviewer – this is a tool to show graphics. The exciting thing is that you can open .dot files. However, only dot is used to render them, not neato or twopi. Too bad.
• ZGRViewer – looks very promising. You can open .dot files and render them with anything (neato, twopi) the output is zoomable and you can move around. Pretty nice. It’s written in Java. Now the question is whether I could use this framework to build my animated viewer that reads the next .dot file and updates the graph nicely. I will get it done someday!
• tinfu – Another java library that draw .dot files. It had trouble with some of my .dot files. I guess the tool’s not very robust.
• Grappa – Another Java tool. The feature list looks promising. The Web demo is interesting. Need to download it and have a closer look.

I guess one thing that I realized is that you could principally build a graph with, let’s say twopi, and generate an SVG. Then you can manipulate that, show it to the user and so on. The question is still how to periodically update a graph without totally re-layouting it. Well, I am working on this. I think I just haven’t really understood the problem yet 😉