Prefuse is a

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

-based

toolkit A toolkit is an assembly of tools; set of basic building units for user interfaces. The word toolkit may refer to: * Abstract Window Toolkit * Accessibility Toolkit * Adventure Game Toolkit * B-Toolkit * Battlefield Mod Development Toolkit * Ch ...

for building interactive

information visualization Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, ...

applications. It supports a rich set of features for

data modeling Data modeling in software engineering is the process of creating a data model for an information system by applying certain formal techniques. Overview Data modeling is a process used to define and analyze data requirements needed to suppo ...

, visualization and interaction. It provides optimized

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, a ...

s for

tables Table may refer to: * Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs * Table (landform), a flat area of land * Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and columns * Table (database), how the table data ...

graphs Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

, and

trees In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are u ...

, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for

animation Animation is a method by which image, still figures are manipulated to appear as Motion picture, moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent cel, celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited ...

, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse uses the

Java 2D Java 2D is an API for drawing two-dimensional graphics using the Java programming language. Every Java 2D drawing operation can ultimately be treated as ''filling'' a ''shape'' using a ''paint'' and ''compositing'' the result onto the screen. Or ...

graphics library A graphics library is a program library designed to aid in rendering computer graphics to a monitor. This typically involves providing optimized versions of functions that handle common rendering tasks. This can be done purely in software and runn ...

, and is easily integrated into

Swing Swing or swinging may refer to: Apparatus * Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth * Pendulum, an object that swings * Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus * Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse * Swing rid ...

applications or

Java applet Java applets were small applications written in the Java programming language, or another programming language that compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. The user launched the Java applet from a ...

s. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

, and can be used freely for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Overview

Prefuse is a

-based extensible

software framework In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. It provides a standard ...

for creating interactive

applications. It can be used to build standalone applications, visual components and

s. Prefuse intends to simplify the processes of visualizing, handling and mapping of data, as well as user interaction. Some of Prefuse's features include: *

Table Table may refer to: * Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs * Table (landform), a flat area of land * Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and columns * Table (database), how the table data ...

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

, and

tree In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are ...

s supporting arbitrary data attributes, data indexing, and selection queries, all with an efficient memory footprint. * Components for layout, color, size, and shape encodings, distortion techniques and more. * A library of controls for common interactive, direct-manipulation operations. * Animation support through a general activity scheduling mechanism. * View transformations supporting panning and zooming, including both geometric and semantic zooming. * Dynamic queries for interactive filtering of data. * Integrated text search using a number of available

search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

. * A physical force

simulation A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of Conceptual model, models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or proc ...

engine for dynamic layout and animation (s.a.

Force-directed graph drawing Force-directed graph drawing algorithms are a class of algorithms for drawing graphs in an aesthetically-pleasing way. Their purpose is to position the nodes of a graph in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space so that all the edges are of m ...

) * Flexibility for multiple views, including "overview+detail" and "small multiples" displays. * A built in, SQL-like expression language for writing queries to prefuse data structures and creating derived data fields. * Support for issuing queries to SQL databases and mapping query results into prefuse data structures. (and perhaps most importantly) * Simple, developer-friendly

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...

s (APIs) for creating custom processing, interaction, and rendering components. Prefuse has been used in school course projects, academic and industrial research, and commercial

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...

Architecture

The design of the prefuse toolkit is based upon the

information visualization reference model The Information visualization reference model is an example of a reference model for information visualization, developed by Ed Chi in 1999, under the name of the ''data state model''. Chi showed that the framework successfully modeled a wide array ...

, a software architecture pattern that breaks up the visualization process into a series of discrete steps. "Prefuse: a toolkit for interactive information visualization" provides more details on implementation and evaluation. The information visualization reference model was developed in the Ph.D. thesis work of Ed Chi, under the name of the data state model. Chi showed that the framework successfully modeled a wide array of visualization applications. Later, Chi's work showed that the model was functionally equivalent to the data flow model used in existing graphics toolkits such as VTK. In their work, "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think", Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman present their own interpretation of this pattern, dubbing it the "information visualization reference model".

Jock D. Mackinlay Jock D. Mackinlay (born August 16, 1952) is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software. With Stuart K. Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of Information Visual ...

Stuart K. Card, Ben Shneiderman (eds.) (1999). ''Readings in information visualization: using vision to think''. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, p.686.

References

External links

* {{Visualization Computational science Free data visualization software Free software programmed in Java (programming language)

Overview

Architecture

See also

References

External links