For April, Evelyn Boettcher brings us an excellent talk previously seen at Dayton Data Visualization:
“dot” draws directed graphs as hierarchies. It runs as a command line program, web visualization service, or with a compatible graphical interface.
Its features include well-tuned layout algorithms for placing nodes and edgesplines, edge labels, “record” shapes with “ports” for drawing data structures; and cluster layouts (citation). Because “dot” takes care of the layout, you are free to focus on how objects are related to each other. Graphs are simply written as a human readable text file: digraph mydotgraph {main -> parse -> execute;}. This talk will give you the tools to start making your own graphs either organizations charts, software flow diagrams, or work flows using dot.
Dot and GraphViz are available from your favorite programming language, whatever it is.
It’s a tool you’ve been missing out on; poor you! Evelyn will fix that.
As always, we take time for discussion and questions around any dynamic language: Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript… whatever’s on your mind!