Springy: A force-directed graph layout algorithm in JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

Springy: A force-directed graph layout algorithm in JavaScript

getspringy.com

37 pointscfontes14 comments

I'd find a comparison against other libs interesting. There's a lot out there already: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7034/graph-visualization-...

That's a good list on SO from Johann Strathaus. Thanks for the link. It's unfortunate that after being open for 5 years, having hundreds of up-votes, and 30 answers with several good responses, the question was recently closed on StackOverflow as being off-topic.

More here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9490003/web-based-large-s...

How is it different from D3's force layout + DOM manipulation? Looks very, very similar to me.

It's an inferior subset of D3, however HN will upvote anything with JS in the title.

Like I just upvoted your comment? Because it had JS in the body... Just kidding, I agree completely with you. It's currently very "in vogue" to promote anything remotely related to JS or Node. I always say, right tool for the job, and if that happens to be JS/Node, great. However, sometimes it feels like these JS pushers have JS as their proverbial hammer, and every single problem they encounter is a nail to be hammered (with JS).

Indeed. See http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4062045 for Mike Bostock's example of a simple force-directed graph including the D3.js code.

(BTW, see http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock for an impressive collection of visualizations made with D3.js. Impressive both in terms of size of the collection, quality of the code and clarity of the visualizations.)

Well, it (slightly) predates D3, for what it's worth:

https://github.com/dhotson/springy/commits/master?page=4 https://github.com/mbostock/d3/commits/master?page=91

If all you need is spring layout without the rest of D3, Springy might be a better fit.

Interesting. I did notice that every once and a while some of the text comes to rest outside or partially outside the canvas.

Hey guys, original author here. Thanks for taking a look. Questions welcome. :)

This has been around for a while. I remember using it in a project 3 years ago.

I am not the author.

Just found it interesting.

Fair enough. Sometimes it's nice to see other people's implementation of the same thing, just for comparison. It's similar to learning how to say things with other words.

Url changed from https://github.com/dhotson/springy since the website links to the source code and is more informative (at least in the short run).

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