Graphviz: The Mac OS X port of automated graph layout software and the DOT language
My, my, my. Here’s an incredible wealth of wonderment for the programmer interested in graphing. If you use software like OmniGraffle to make flowcharts, org charts, network diagrams, and the like, but would like to be able to do mapping automatically, or perhaps with a free tool and a markup language like XML, you might get lost in the whole wide world of Graphviz. This software is a doorway to the world of automated graphing, developed mostly by AT&T Labs and released as an open source project in 2004. Graphviz from Pixelglow is the award-winning Mac OS X port of the original AT&T Graphviz GUI. The whole automated graphing universe is way too big for me to describe here, but I do want to jot down a couple of URL’s that I think will be most helpful in learning about it:
- AT&T Labs Graphviz website
- WebDot, a CGI web interface to .dot files with lots of amazing examples
- Ajax Graphviz, an amazing, interactive, Ajax-powered interface to graphing
- Doxygen Documentation for Graphviz, here mainly because it is itself a demonstration of the power of graphing with .dot
- Regular Documentation, and lots of it, too
- Graphviz Resources, and you’ll be amazed by how much there is!
