Prefuse is a

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

-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 * Cheminformatics toolkits * Dojo Toolk ...

for building interactive

information visualization Data and information visualization (data viz/vis or info viz/vis) is the practice of designing and creating Graphics, graphic or visual Representation (arts), representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and i ...

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. It may be applied as part of broader Model-driven engineering (MDE) concept. Overview Data modeli ...

, visualization and interaction. It provides optimized

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

s for tables,

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, e.g., including only woody plants with secondary growth, only p ...

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

animation Animation is a filmmaking technique whereby still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animati ...

, 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.The ...

graphics library A graphics library or graphics API 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 ...

, and is easily integrated into Swing applications or

Java applet Java applets were applet, small applications written in the Java (programming language), Java programming language, or another programming language that Compiled language, compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Ja ...

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 a software abstraction that provides generic functionality which developers can extend with custom code to create applications. It establishes a standard foundation for building and deploying soft ...

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 (database), how the table data arrangement is used within the databases * Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs * Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and column ...

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 discret ...

, 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, e.g., including only woody plants with secondary growth, only ...

s supporting arbitrary data attributes, data indexing, and selection queries, all with an efficient

memory footprint Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running. The word footprint generally refers to the extent of physical dimensions that an object occupies, giving a sense of its size. In computing, t ...

. * 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 Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases. By content/topic Gene ...

. * A physical force

simulation A simulation is an imitative representation of a process or system that could exist in the real world. In this broad sense, simulation can often be used interchangeably with model. Sometimes a clear distinction between the two terms is made, in ...

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 ...

) * Flexibility for multiple views, including "overview+detail" and "small multiples" displays. * A built in,

SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced ''S-Q-L''; or alternatively as "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling s ...

-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 connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

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 designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

Architecture

The design of the prefuse toolkit is based upon the

information visualization reference model Information is an abstract concept that refers to something which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the interpretation (perhaps formally) of that which may be sensed, or their abstractions. Any natur ...

, 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 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 and information visualization software Free software programmed in Java (programming language)

Overview

Architecture

See also

References

External links