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How to build a graph visualization engine

memgraph.com

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Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#11

Post by stuntkite »

mbuda wrote: post #8
stuntkite wrote: post #4

I was an early employee at the first round of graphistry.com. I'm really proud of Leo and that he took it from the brink and put it back on the market and is growing it. I think more people should build more graph visualization engines, but you're going to have a hard time competing with how slick pygraphistry is, but there is not enough alternatives that are worth a shit. Graphistry, when I left was able to do half…

+ Have you seen https://github.com/cosmograph-org/cosmos ? Looks like a really scalable thing :D

I had not. This is very pretty and I will play with it. Thank you.

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#12

Post by mkaic »

> Building something from scratch is rarely a good idea.

In the context of this article, I agree. Professional products should probably not try to build everything from scratch. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that building things from scratch as personal projects is one of the absolute best ways to gain a deep understanding of a topic. Even if you go on to use graph visualization engines built by others in all your future work, that doesn't mean you shouldn't give it a go on your own time if you're interested in trying it out.

Not trying to be contrarian or criticize the article, just my 2 cents. In general I agree with the sentiment of using existing solutions wherever possible.

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#13

Post by mbuda »

traceroute66 wrote: post #9

I do hate spam-blogs. Bait and switch blog posts (i.e that start potentially interesting and then half-way morph into a poorly disguised sales pitch) are so tiresome.

Check out the Github repo https://github.com/memgraph/orb, it's Apache-2, with a lot of thinking around the software design :D

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#14

Post by mbuda »

mkaic wrote: post #12

> Building something from scratch is rarely a good idea. In the context of this article, I agree. Professional products should probably not try to build everything from scratch. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that building things from scratch as personal projects is one of the absolute best ways to gain a deep understanding of a topic. Even if you go on to use graph visualization engines built by others…

Yep, the history here is that we tried out a couple of standalone tools with the appropriate license (e.g., VisJS, which is a great library), but nothing was suitable after some point, and then the best thing was to build. You learn more + we put it open source + we can integrate some other, maybe more scalable visualization engines in the future :D

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#15

Post by mbuda »

erwinh wrote: post #2

Recently a new web-based fully gpu driven graph visualisation engine was released and it could handle quite some big graphs directly in the browser: https://twitter.com/hoogerwoord/status/1568188361503907840?s... Happy that people are building new graph visualisation engines and I think still a very open space for innovation in interactively exploring graph/network structures.

https://github.com/cosmograph-org/cosmos seems super nice! Yep, it's amazing to see better and better tooling around!

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#16

Post by stuntkite »

mkaic wrote: post #12

> Building something from scratch is rarely a good idea. In the context of this article, I agree. Professional products should probably not try to build everything from scratch. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that building things from scratch as personal projects is one of the absolute best ways to gain a deep understanding of a topic. Even if you go on to use graph visualization engines built by others…

It depends on how you value your time and effort. Not every idea should be valued by its market fit. I don't think people should write code they are uninterested in writing. That's my litmus test for myself. Usually when I'm really, really interested the thing I'm aiming at doing initially isn't even about what I'm really trying to solve. It's picking away at the cruft over something and then I can see what's on the other side. Don't write things from scratch if you absolutely hate it and you are only doing it because you think the market will buy it and you wanna be a big biz, unless you feel like it. I don't know, YMMV. Programming is stupid and I plan to be a pig farmer as soon as possible.

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#17

Post by dtomicevic »

mkaic wrote: post #12

> Building something from scratch is rarely a good idea. In the context of this article, I agree. Professional products should probably not try to build everything from scratch. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that building things from scratch as personal projects is one of the absolute best ways to gain a deep understanding of a topic. Even if you go on to use graph visualization engines built by others…

agreed, you can learn a lot by building something from scratch. also, some of the successful software tools we use today came from personal projects so it can be a win win

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#18

Post by stuntkite »

mbuda wrote: post #13
traceroute66 wrote: post #9

I do hate spam-blogs. Bait and switch blog posts (i.e that start potentially interesting and then half-way morph into a poorly disguised sales pitch) are so tiresome.

Check out the Github repo https://github.com/memgraph/orb , it's Apache-2, with a lot of thinking around the software design :D

This looks pretty clunky. Is this what Neo4j uses in their viewer? It feels like it's related.

Re: How to build a graph visualization engine

#19

Post by Noumenon72 »

"And why you shouldn't" doesn't deserve equal billing in the headline. The article structure is

* first two sentences: You shouldn't build from scratch

* next four sentences: How not building from scratch failed for us

* entire rest of article: How we built from scratch and made an amazing product you should try.

I guess the implication is "you shouldn't build an engine because we just built the engine to end all engines"?

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