Today on the JSViz Blog, Lorien announced svg2vml, a thin translation layer that enables VML capable browsers (Internet Explorer) to display a subset of SVG without any new code. Checkout the full post for details.
I just posted this new tutorial on jsviz.org... JSViz 0.3.3 includes a few examples to help you get started. In this tutorial, I'm going to go over one of them. We'll create a Snowflake Graph from the contents of an XML file. You can find the example source, with comments based on this tutorial in the 0.3.3 Distribution. Here's the final product1) Start with a new HTML file Add appropriate JSViz imports and an empty "init()" function body:
The jsviz.org website is now available but I'll be cross-posting big news here to keep subscribers and search traffic informed: JSViz 0.3.3 is now available. This release includes two major features: Snowflake Model is an updated implementation of the "Tree Model" offered in JSViz 0.2. This is a geometric model, offering superior speed to Force Directed layouts, but only capable of representing hierarchical data (sorry, no circuits). Layouts offer a simplified interface to the core JSViz libraries. New projects can now be created with minimal code and simple configuration. Additional examples, using Layouts: An Example Force Directed Graph with Data Loader You can download the full source as a single ZIP archive or browse individual files on the Download page I'll follow up with tutorials shortly.
I've received a lots of great comments and e-mails about the music recommendations demo I posted a week or so ago. But a number of you mentioned that the recommendations were a little funny. Questions and observations so far:
Right. So ... There's a lesson here:
There's always a little bit of "magic" in a mashup. The music recommendations demo gets album relationships from Amazon.com's E-commerce API. Similarity is based on buying patterns, which apparently lead to some unexpected or disappointing results. So I decided to try out an alternative. I worked up a quick mashup using the Audioscrobbler (Last.fm) API for Artist-to-Artist recommendations. Audioscrobbler uses the listening patterns of it's users to determine relationships. Unfortunately, the images served up with this API aren't especially useful in identifying artists, especially when scaled down. So this demo is currently text-only. If you're interested, the demo could be extended to grab an album image from Amazon.com. I tried this and bailed out quickly because it added a lot of latency to the addition of new nodes, but you may be able to cut this down using an image cache.
Oh, one more thing! These demos don't work so well in ie7. This isn't an issue with the JSViz 0.3.1 API. I'll fix the demos when I have some spare time. Thanks for all the feedback. It's useful in driving this project.
Last week I showed you a tutorial that I put together for The Ajax Experience, where we built a force directed model from the contents of an XML file. Today I'm presenting an example with full source from another tutorial in this talk, where we make a complete, interactive application that models music recommendations using Amazon.com's Similarity API. I'll be covering this example in detail in my talk next week at The AJAX Experience. You may view, download, and modify the source in this example. It's available under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This application will enable a user to search for music by artist. When the user selects an album, they'll see a graph model reperesenting the album's relationship to similar albums, based on Amazon.com buying history. Here's a screenshot:
Click here to use this example application... A Note on Aesthetics Continue reading "Modeling Music Recommendations in JavaScript with JSViz" » |
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