Design and Implementation of the Extensible Graph Drawing System Dr.Graph

Lack of extensibility and flexibility is the main reason why grapheditors today seem to have only a very short lifespan compared to tools in other research areas. Some of the existing editors can be extended with additional graph algorithms, however new graph drawing concepts and display methods are hard or impossibly to add to these systems without a complete reimplementation. We therefore designed the graph drawing system Dr.Graph to be highly extensible --- even at runtime --- while providing the full set of features available in existing grapheditors, such that Dr.Graph is easy to use and has the potential to cover a wide range of application domains. This research is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Design and Implementation of Dr.Graph ii Design and Implementation of Dr.Graph CONTENTS iii Contents 1 Graph Drawing Systems 1 1.1 Obsolescence of Programming Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Experiences with Existing Systems . . . . . . . . . . ..