GraphViz is a Perl interface to the GraphViz graphing tool.

GraphViz is a Perl interface to the GraphViz graphing tool.

SYNOPSIS

use GraphViz;

my $g = GraphViz->new();

$g->add_node('London');
$g->add_node('Paris', label => 'City ofnlurve');
$g->add_node('New York');

$g->add_edge('London' => 'Paris');
$g->add_edge('London' => 'New York', label => 'Far');
$g->add_edge('Paris' => 'London');

print $g->as_png;

This module provides an interface to layout and image generation of directed and undirected graphs in a variety of formats (PostScript, PNG, etc.) using the "dot", "neato", "twopi", "circo" and "fdp" programs from the GraphViz project (http://www.graphviz.org/ or http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/).

What is a graph?

A (undirected) graph is a collection of nodes linked together with edges.
A directed graph is the same as a graph, but the edges have a direction.

What is GraphViz?

This module is an interface to the GraphViz toolset (http://www.graphviz.org/). The GraphViz tools provide automatic graph layout and drawing. This module simplifies the creation of graphs and hides some of the complexity of the GraphViz module.

Laying out graphs in an aesthetically-pleasing way is a hard problem - there may be multiple ways to lay out the same graph, each with their own quirks. GraphViz luckily takes part of this hard problem and does a pretty good job in a couple of seconds for most graphs.

Why should I use this module?

Observation aids comprehension. That is a fancy way of expressing that popular faux-Chinese proverb: "a picture is worth a thousand words".
Text is not always the best way to represent anything and everything to do with a computer programs. Pictures and images are easier to assimilate than text. The ability to show a particular thing graphically can aid a great deal in comprehending what that thing really represents.

Diagrams are computationally efficient, because information can be indexed by location; they group related information in the same area. They also allow relations to be expressed between elements without labeling the elements.
A friend of mine used this to his advantage when trying to remember important dates in computer history. Instead of sitting down and trying to remember everything, he printed over a hundred posters (each with a date and event) and plastered these throughout his house. His spatial memory is still so good that asked last week (more than a year since the experiment) when Lisp was invented, he replied that it was upstairs, around the corner from the toilet, so must have been around 1958.

Spreadsheets are also a wonderfully simple graphical representation of computational models.

Requirements:

· Perl