Looking for a good web framework for data visualization

Question

Just wondering if anyone can point me to a good web framework for displaying large-scaled network

• Need the ability to display only a small portion of the network, but allowing the possibility to drill down on certain node/portion of the network interactively.

• Optionally the ability to allow interactive editing of the network/graph; e.g., connecting nodes or breaking edges.

• The simpler the better!

Answer 1

There's our library, mxGraph. If you want open source you could try JIT or D3.

Answer 2

I had similar requirements and I tested about four libraries including d3 and infoVis/JIT.

I was using force-directed layout in both d3 and infoVis. Both of them are quite close but I ended up choosing infoVis/JIT because I had some problems in d3, solutions of which were not easy.

1: When you have a graph with many nodes in d3, the graph will keep moving/animating for quite longer time. I found that it was because d3 graph animates per tick. I found some solutions here and in forums but it was not easy to solve this problem and they did not work for me.

2: Once the graph is rendered, if you try and drag a node, the whole graph would move and animate itself. Whereas my requirement was to be able to drag and position individual nodes independently, keeping the graph as it is, so that user can re-arrange nodes if he/she wants to. I could not find any simple solution for this one in d3.

Both of these problems were solved in infoVis/JIT.

@"Need the ability to display only a small portion of the network, but allowing the possibility to drill down on certain node/portion of the network interactively." I have implemented this functionality using infoVis.