Graphviz or Dynagraph for Graph-manipulation Program?
- by noahlavine
I'm looking into writing a program that will show a graph to the user. The graph will change over time (the user should be able to right-click on a graph item and ask for more detail, which will pop out new bits of the graph), and the user might be able to drag parts of the graph around. I would ideally also like to be able to specify the relative layout of certain parts of the graph myself while leaving the overall layout up to a library, but that's not essential.
I'm trying to decide on a graph layout library to use. As far as I can tell, the two leading candidates are Graphviz and Dynagraph. The Dynagraph website suggests that Graphviz is for drawing static graphs, and that Dynagraph was forked from Graphviz and contains algorithms for graphs that will be updated. It has a sample program called Dynasty that does exactly what I want. However, the Graphviz site contains an example program called Lefty which seems to do exactly what I want. Graphviz also seems to be much more widely used, judging by Google (and SO) results.
Finally, I'd like to code the GUI part in a language like Python or Scheme, which makes me a bit hesitant to use C++ because I understand it's harder to interface that to interpreters.
So my question is, which library is better for what I'm trying to do? Do they both have strong and weak points? Has one of them actually ceased development and is just leaving its website up to confuse me?
(I've seen http://stackoverflow.com/questions/464000/simple-dynamic-graph-display-for-c and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2376987/open-source-libraries-to-design-directed-graphs, but I can't tell whether they're right about the Graphviz or Dynagraph choice because of Lefty and also the language issue.)
