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WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

webgraphviz.com

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Re: WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

#13

Post by sillysaurus3 »

Wait, was this really written in 93?

There's no way, right? Was JS even this functional back in 93?

Hmm, I wonder what the cite at the bottom means then:

Object Oriented Graphs

Stephen North, 3/19/93

Searching Stephen North brings up a very interesting Google Scholar page full of citations about graphs and dot: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_QJP9-0AAAAJ&hl=en

Neato. (Ha. Cue yakety-yak music.)

Holy moly! Attention HN, we have a delightful mystery on our hands! Sound the alarm: http://www.webgraphviz.com/viz.js

So who cares? Well, it's clojure-compiled for one, so all the variables are all Yu Ugy Jagugnug (i.e. Worf would understand).

For two, the js-beautified version is 56,586 lines! What could this be?

It's all hardcore math/algorithm type code. No comments, no indication of how to pick up the scent. Hmmm.

Welp, there goes my afteroon. See you on the flipside. tugs feverishly at massive ball of string^Wyarn^WJS

Here's a beautified gist, if you want to dig. https://gist.github.com/anonymous/52cd90a1fa9c36b1b3e87a431d...

(Seriously though, WTF is going on in that file? The last time I saw 55k lines of condensed algorithms, it was when I concatenated together all of emacs' source code from one of its earliest commits.)

Oh.. Is this just emscripten? It looks like compiler output. Yeah, "g | 0" is an asm.js trick.

Man.. This is a really effective way to obfuscate code, holy moly. So I'm guessing that's just graphviz's C code?

EDIT: Yup. At the very bottom, there's a single string, literally the only string in the entire file that gives any clue what the heck is going on: "vizRenderFromString".

And indeed, it leads us to https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js/blob/a8f5fd9ec41482e31bb0b... and more generally to the viz.js codebase: https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js

Oh, duh. Graphviz was written back in '93, and that sample code contains a citation back to its author.

What a cool program! And a cool sequence of layers... I love the onion-y nature of modern computing.

Re: WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

#16

Post by jraph »

tckr wrote: post #3

I personally find http://viz-js.com to be superior.

I have used Viz.js since 2012 in Aude [1], a tool to play with Finite State Machines, in order to display results from algorithms like minimization, determinization and other common FSM-related algorithms, and also to provide an automatic redraw feature when drawing FSMs. The user can also input FSMs in a small description language, and they are drawn automatically using the same system.

For people who don't know Viz.js, it is basically GraphViz compiled for the web as ASM.js using emscripten plus a convenient way to call it. Usage is simple: you give the DOT code, and it returns an SVG document as string (other formats are actually supported).

Viz.js is awesome. Thanks Mike Daines! And obviously, thanks Graphviz!

Webgraphiz uses a viz.js file. Is it actually the same Viz.js? (edit: yes, it is)

[1] https://aude.imag.fr/

Re: WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

#17

Post by jraph »

chaz6 wrote: post #14
hawski wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the whole point of WebAnything?

It is very useful in corporate networks where you are not allowed to install anything locally.

There is a market to take here: Javascript as a Service, to bypass CorpNets.

Re: WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

#18

Post by applecrazy »

fpazin wrote: post #12
applecrazy wrote: post #4

While this is certainly interesting, I've been looking for a JS tikz port using

visjs.org can render graphs using canvas : http://visjs.org/network_examples.html

I meant rendering tikz diagrams[1] using js/canvas tag. It's used commonly in math textbooks typeset in LaTeX.

[1]: https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2013/05/28/How-to-draw-Vecto...

Re: WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

#19

Post by flgr »

ape4 wrote: post #9

Graphviz can output to svg and that's all this seems to be doing. I guess it saves you install it.

Another use case I had was embedding this into a graph heavy MediaWiki with convenient markup. That means the graphs are very easy to edit and will be updated after each edit with no backend magic required.

Re: WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

#20

Post by MurrayHill1980 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13

Wait, was this really written in 93? There's no way, right? Was JS even this functional back in 93? Hmm, I wonder what the cite at the bottom means then: Object Oriented Graphs Stephen North, 3/19/93 Searching Stephen North brings up a very interesting Google Scholar page full of citations about graphs and dot: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_QJP9-0AAAAJ&hl=en Neato. (Ha. Cue yakety-yak music.) Holy moly!…

Some important tools were written after 1993 (stress majorization around 2004 https://graphviz.gitlab.io/_pages/Documentation/GKN04.pdf ; sfdp around 2007-08 when Yifan Hu joined AT&T Research, edge bundling in mingle and orthogonal routing were done in the last few years) but, yes, basically right.
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