I'm also coming from Java world and at some point used DOT+Graphviz. However, recently I found JavaScript libraries rendering to either html5 canvas or SVG easier to use. I would look into sigma.js (http://sigmajs.org/) or d3 (d3js.org). Especially the latter offers a great level of customization. One of the good thing about Gephi is that it offers force-based layouting algorithms, and sigma.js has its own implementation of Gephi's Force Atlas2 algorithm.

I m also stuck with a similar task.

The "fdp" algorithm of Graphviz is based on that approach (http://www.graphviz.org/). Then there's the "FruchtermanReingold" class in the OGDF library (http://www.ogdf.net/) and the "de.cau.cs.kieler.klay.force" Eclipse plugin of the KIELER project (http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/en/rtsys/kieler/).

Try Gephi.....https://gephi.org/

I'm also coming from Java world and at some point used DOT+Graphviz. However, recently I found JavaScript libraries rendering to either html5 canvas or SVG easier to use. I would look into sigma.js (http://sigmajs.org/) or d3 (d3js.org). Especially the latter offers a great level of customization. One of the good thing about Gephi is that it offers force-based layouting algorithms, and sigma.js has its own implementation of Gephi's Force Atlas2 algorithm.

Gephi! is very good!

What about the prefuse toolkit (http://www.prefuse.org)? It is very useful.

By the way, you can also try hiveplot: http://www.hiveplot.net/

Just a small remark: if you find that Java libraries are not suitable for you, but JavaScripts ones are, and given that you have to plot stuff from Java, you may want to consider the following path. You can use the JavaScript engine embedded into JDK 6 and later (Mozilla Rhino https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Rhino).

However, most of JavaScript plotting libraries require browser to renderer their stuff. Therefore you will need to use env.js (http://www.envjs.com/) to load a script for emulating "headless" browser first, and then load libraries like JQuery Flot, or d3.js. env.js distribution contains nice examples how to load jQuery or Prototype libraries from a Java program.

Hi,

You can use JavaFX. I think that it would adapted to your project.

You can get the official documentation from Oracle here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/documentation/index.html

And you can see a very large number of various samples that show the capacity of this powerful graphical library, just here:

http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/javafx/2.2/samples/Ensemble/index.html

Good luck !

The best tool I found for visualizing graphs and networks is GraphThing but if your planning to use some library so that you can program things as per your needs than there are two library a gcc based SNAP(Stanford Network Analysis) or you can use the java based JUNG (http://jung.sourceforge.net/) the best open source available in the domain.

Dear respondents,

thank you so much for your valuable feedback! I guess it will take me months to exploit all your suggestions.

I have tried Gephi now. Their Explorative Analysis Framework looks comparatively good (e.g. my Facebook profile), I like the idea of preventing local node overlaps with a force directed approach. However, accessing the .jar seems to be a bit more challenging. I`m currently not sure If gephi-based GUI elements can be applied (like pre-defined JPanels that are capable to communicate with the rest of my visual framework), or if I will have to create one my own and use gephi (only) as a backend-blackbox component.

I also made good experiences with the JUNG libary, but here I believe the drawback is the missing functionality for weighted edges. While I found a way to individualize the edges visual representation, I`m not sure if edge weights can be incorporated in the respective algorithms of the library to calculate layouts sensitive to the edge weights.

I will charge an assistant to investigate all the other solutions you have provided, especially Graphviz, sigma, d3, prevfuse, hiveplot and JavaFX. Again: thank you very much!

Btw: following a web-based approach and then mapping it into a desktop-based JAVA environment (thank you Vyacheslav) seems to be a really nice concept to tackle the ugly decision problem whether to choose desktop or web as your targeted platform. Web-based development that can also be mapped into a desktop environment may be a good way to uniform the technical visualization roadmap. I will keep a close eye on that.

Regards to all respondents