What are jquery (/javascript) treemaps? (ratio, datavisualization, area, zoomable,squares,rectangles,space,volume)

Question

Example

I am about to make one or better an extented/custom version ( like for example world population:first continents boxes visible only and countries small within, then scroll/zoom in and even states, cities become visible within the country boxes, etc., etc. (can be animated/fading in or just static and completely loaded from the beginning since I prefer a thin solution and its a limited dataset)

Yet I would know how to go for it with javascript or php only, but jquery sounds like good performance and writting far less code, so I want to learn it for this.

Do you know of a suitable jquery plugin?

or else one of these wikipedia/List_of_treemapping_software
or these wikipedia/Data_visualization_software? (and there .js exports)

thanks!=)

Answer 1

It's a treemap and also a 2d bin-packing algorithm. I assume you have boxes then sort them by width or height and pick the first and put it into a tree. Split the tree along both axis and put the next box in the best free space. Repeat the steps until the boxes are out or the tree is full. You can look in Google search for a jquery treemap plugin.