Tulip
Tulip is a software system dedicated to the visualization of huge graphs. It manages graphs with up to 500,000 elements (node and edges) on a personal computer (PIII 600 with 256MB RAM). The Tulip architecture provides the following features: 3D visualizations, 3D modifications, plugin support, support for clusters and navigation, automatic graph drawing, automatic clustering of graphs, automatic selection of elements, and automatic coloring of elements according to a metric.
| Tags | Information Management Utilities Software Development Libraries education |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX Linux Windows Windows Windows Mac OS X |
| Implementation | C++ |
Recent releases
- 30 Jun 2009 11:35
Changes: This release has a new rendering mode for the meta nodes, a new configuration tab for the GUI interactors, new vector types in the Tulip core library API, new options for configure script, support for FTGL 2.1.3, GCC/G++ 4.4, and Qt 4.5, better support for 64-bit platforms, and many bugfixes. Management of graph attributes was added in the undo/redo mechanism. The rendering of edges was improved. This version has been built and tested on the new Fedora Core 11, Ubuntu 9.04, and Windows 7 RC releases.
- 16 Mar 2009 16:41
Changes: This is a minor release with many performance improvements and bugfixes. The ability to configure an HTTP proxy was added in the plugins manager.
- 23 Jan 2009 13:39
Changes: This release improves management of multiple views on multiple graphs and adds many bugfixes.
- 23 Dec 2008 14:41
Changes: A new undo/redo mechanism was added. Two new types of graph views were added. The OpenGL rendering of the graph elements was improved.
- 25 Nov 2008 12:26
Changes: This is a minor release with bugfixes and a code cleanup.
- All comments
Recent commentsRe: Very powerful, but a bit rough
> - there is no developer's mailing list
One is available on sourceforge.
> - you have to go through a silly
> interface on their web site
I need to have some feed back from people that use
Tulip. It is not silly !
> - there's no programmer's documentation
Use doxygen on the source code you will have some.
> - there's no file format documentation
See the web page of Tulip.
> Mind, that's almost a nit all the
> formats, except for the native Tulip
> format, are fairly easy to reverse
> engineer.
I don't think that you have open a tlp file. It is text
using Lisp syntax and behavior.
%Note, however, that GML does
> *not* stand for Geographic Markup
> Language
Tulip is a graph visualization software not a
Geographic map viewer.
> Reading information garnered at that
> site I learned that Tulip supports a
> simple subset of GML and not the entire
> language. Morever, as with all the
> other file formats, the Tulip GML
> importer uses a hand-written lexer and
> parser and not, say, lex and yacc.
I do not use lex and yacc because it is too slow for
the size of graph we want to import. From my
knowledge all the basic properties of the GML format
are supported, others properties are specific to
Graphlet.
> - user interface design is ad hoc and
> difficult to use
Give me some idea... Version 2.0.0 uses MDI
interface that should be more easy to use.
> - use of void*'s is Evil
Why does it exist ? There is not a lot of void* in Tulip
instead when we are using typeinfo mechanism. I
don't think that it is possible to remove them without
building a silly and unefficient hierachy of classes.
> - Code comments? WHAT code comments?
> Hell, I'll even take the French over
> nothing. Murd!
Read XP programming... If the code is well done with
good name function we do not need code comment.
> - there is a LOT of member data in class
> public and protected sections
You are right, some refactoring is needed.
> Still it's a potent tool, but it can be
> infuriating to use and develop for.
It is your point of view. A lot of people are using Tulip
and are programming with it.
Tulip Forum and Bug report on sourceforge
Management of bug reports, new features and forum is
now available for Tulip on Sourceforge. The new 2.0.0
version includes a lot of new features, we need your help
to test it. Feel free to give comment on the new HCI.
URL: sourceforge.net/projects/auber (sorry for the project's
name but tulip was already taken on freshmeat :-( )
Thanks for your help since the begining.
David Auber
Very powerful, but a bit rough
Tulip is indeed a very powerful tool, but does suffer from a few problems.
- there is no developer's mailing list
- you have to go through a silly interface on their web site to get source tar balls (unless you go through freshmeat)
- there's no programmer's documentation
- there's no file format documentation
Mind, that's almost a nit all the formats, except for the native Tulip format, are fairly easy to reverse engineer. Note, however, that GML does *not* stand for Geographic Markup Language as I initially thought; GML is an acronym for Graph Modelling Language. You can get more information on that file format at http://www.infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/Graphlet/GML/.
Reading information garnered at that site I learned that Tulip supports a simple subset of GML and not the entire language. Morever, as with all the other file formats, the Tulip GML importer uses a hand-written lexer and parser and not, say, lex and yacc. Again, this isn't egregious, but in my experience this raises a red flag.
- user interface design is ad hoc and difficult to use
Why have the initial dialog that has per graph functionality (and buttons X-ed out) when that makes more sense to have that functionality soley on the graph dialog?
- use of void*'s is Evil
- Code comments? WHAT code comments? Hell, I'll even take the French over nothing. Murd!
- there is a LOT of member data in class public and protected sections
Still it's a potent tool, but it can be infuriating to use and develop for.
Really powerful and flexible
I'm really happy to have found such a powerful tool:
I'm working in Biocomputing and I'm used to deal with huge graphs (100000 nodes) to represent biological behaviours such as metabolical pathways.
It's also really easy to implement ad-hoc layout/graph management plug-ins to focus on what really matters to oneself.
The tlp format is something we've been waiting for years: as flexible as XML, but far more compact and cleverly designed.
With the efficient memory management, it's also really easy to manipulate many graphs at once in order to compare them, like in molecular 3D structure comparison.
Tulip: A nice program for graph visualisation.
Hello,
I try Tulip for watching complex systems behavoirs,
and i'm glade to see that it's very fast.
You can easily manipulate sub-graphs to have other views.
The software have power tools like clustering or property management.
I encourage other people to make other plugings to enhance the software capabilities.