Prefuse Visualization Toolkit
April 19, 2007 — amutiaraA Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization
applications.
Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. The visualization gallery and demonstration video provide numerous examples of the types of applications that can be built with the prefuse toolkit.To learn more about prefuse, take a look at the user’s manual or the frequently asked questions. For users of the alpha version of the toolkit, there is also a porting guide for migrating to the beta version. Prefuse is an extensible software framework for helping software developers create interactive information visualization applications using the Java programming language. It can be used to buildstandalone applications, visual components embedded in larger applications, and web applets. Prefuse intends to greatly simplify the processes of representing and efficiently handing data,mapping data to visual representations (e.g., through spatialposition, size, shape, color, etc), and interacting with thedata. Some of the features of prefuse include:
- Table, Graph, and Tree data structures supporting arbitrarydata attributes, data indexing, and selection queries, all with an efficient memory footprint.
- Components for layout, color, size, and shape encodings, distortion techniques, animation, and more.
- A library of interaction 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 physical force simulation engine for dynamic layout and animation.
- 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.
- Simple, developer-friendly APIs for creating custom processing, interaction, and rendering components.
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