Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Map That Will Be

I've been looking ahead to stage three of the project in the hopes of avoiding any unpleasant surprises that could lead to delays. (And as a diversion from working on the data parser, which I'm really getting sick of looking at.) As I mentioned in an earlier post, GraphStream's performance proved inadequate, so I planned to use Prefuse for the map. But then I discovered that Prefuse doesn't support mixed graphs. I anticipated another time-consuming search for a suitable graph library.

But first I decided to see how hard it would be to hack support for mixed graphs into Prefuse. As it turns out, it wasn't hard at all. I accomplished it by simply extending five classes. And as a testament to both the flexibility of Prefuse and my own mad coding skills, I did it in just a few hours from a starting point of having almost no understanding of how Prefuse is structured.

I still need to learn how to use decorators to make it pretty like the mockup I made with GraphStream. But that'll be the fun part.

No comments:

Post a Comment