a survey of web visualization toolkits

I'm always on the lookout for new tools to create graphs, charts, and other visualizations. It is an obsession that dates back to my days slaving over gnuplot and R scripts (or even *gasp* metapost). Here are some more modern toolkits I've come across which lend themselves to visualizations for the web.

• Processing has to be one of my favorites, probably because I've been using it the longest.
• And if Processing isn't web-2.0-enough for you, there is always the Javascript implementation.
• Protovis - any visualization toolkit that can be used to create an interactive version of Minard’s Napoleon has to get good marks.
• Google has Chart Tools.
• Degrafa has been used to create some beautiful visualizations.
• Or there is the slightly higher-level Axiis if you prefer (which is built on top of Degrafa).
• Should you be religiously opposed to flash, you might like dygraphs
• Prefuse is another Java toolkit with some great graph and chart types
• And Flare (also from the Prefuse guys) you post those interactive visualizations to the web in flash.

Ok everyone, which ones haven't I seen yet?

normals - a processing experiment

As part of a visualization I'm attempting to create, I was doing some experiments in processing. One of the experiments involved distributing points randomly on a sphere, and drawing the normal vectors for those points. Add in a trackball for rotating, panning, and zooming and it ended up being a pretty cool interactive toy by itself.

plasmodium protein interaction network visualization

I was recently finishing my write-up about using processing to create interactive art. In that article I wanted to mention the animation and physics processing libraries by Jeff Traer Bernstein and while looking up the references I was reminded of this visualization. It has always been one of my favorites, so I'm finally getting around to sharing it.