Interactive graph visualisation

Question

Situation

Similar to this question, I\'m looking for a way to create a GUI where users are able to see a graph (in the graph theory sense) and interact with it. Vehicl

Answer 1

I ended up finding that the visualisation libraries that I considered were not able to animate objects travelling along edges.

I experimented with wxPython, and its floatcanvas, and found that fairly straight forward to use (substantially simpler than the OpenGL solution would have been). This gave me the freedom to animate as I needed, but didn't give me any wrappers around displaying connected nodes - I had to write that myself.

This is quite an old question, so there may be other libraries out there now that fulfil this requirement, or it might be that the libraries I considered have advanced and can now do this. If I had to implement it from scratch today, I would be inclined to experiment with a web based UI, potentially utilising web sockets to keep up with the back end in terms of data rate. I don't know how well the animation would scale though - I've found Canvas and SVG get choppy when animating large numbers of things at once. Maybe WebGL would suit better.