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Graph Gear has been interpreted differently by a lot of different people. We’ve always intended graph gear to be a toolkit - the expectation being that it makes it easier to make interactive graph visualization, but you still need to be something of a coder to get the job done.
It turns out that a significant proportion of our users don’t view graphgear this way. The expect it to be more or less a visualization component, that you drop it in to a web page and do something with it. The current release of graph gear goes a larger way to embracing this notion.
Part of this is the more extensive javascript support. To help demonstrate this we’ve built a little application that let’s you browse twitter users. It took about an hour to make, so it isn’t particularly feature rich or bug tested (firefox or safari are safe, ie - not sure, because of the javascript, not graph gear). You can see it here - TwitterGraph!
Basically we use the nodeNotify function and the ability to add nodes via javascript to make this work. When you click on a node, it get’s three friends from the twitter api and adds them with the javascript api. This was a nice exercise for us - it shows you can build interesting things with graph gear. It also shows that the javascript stuff needs some work. We need to better support dynamic services and js data stores (with json, instead of xml probably). Hopefully we can package some of this up and make the next release for graph gear a more “component” like visualization platform.
