Gephi at JavaOne 2010

Gephi is one of the Duke’s Choice Award winners this year and has therefore be kindly invited to attend the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

The project has been featured in the Mason Street tent during the five days of the conference. Moreover, Mathieu Bastian (Gephi’s Software Architect) presented Gephi during the Java Frontier Keynote as a brilliant example of Java innovation. Mathieu provided a short demo using a longitudinal Java dependency graph, the classes in the Java package from Java 1.2 to Java 6. The keynote was introduced by Ray Kurzweil, who insisted on the vast amount of data, the “Petabyte Age” and the need to process, analyze and extract value from it.

You can watch the video of the Gephi presentation online (go to topic 36). EDIT: now on Vimeo in HD!

Mathieu Bastian presenting a live demo of Java packages evolutions at JavaOne 2010 conference.

The project has been also mentioned in the following articles:

• Exploring the Technology Frontier with Ray Kurzweil and Java Technology Innovators
• My JavaOne 2010 Reflections

Gephi wins Duke’s Choice Award 2010

The Duke’s Choice Awards recognize and honor extreme innovation in the world of Java technology, and are granted to the most innovative uses of the Java platform. Because the primary judging criteria is innovation, the awards put even small developer shops on an equal footing with multinational giants. The winners are selected by Oracle’s Java technology leadership team.

Congratulations to all Gephi contributors! Thank you to the Oracle’s Java Team to make Gephi a Duke’s Choice and the technology that have enabled us to build Gephi and Gephi Toolkit.

The winners will be featured at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, September 19-23rd. Gephi’s Software Architect, Mathieu Bastian will be present there to receive the award, and attend the conference!

Java provides all the components and development tools to develop large data-intensive open-source applications. Gephi is built on top of the Netbeans Platform, and profit from its module and window systems. The platform allows us to propose solutions to reuse and extend features, in terms of plug-ins, and let developers create new data wrappers, algorithms or filters easily. The rendering engine is built with JOGL (Java OpenGL) and gives responsiveness and interactivity, thanks to hardware acceleration. We use a large number of Java libraries. I would like to use the occasion to offer thanks to all contributors of these projects.

A new video that features Gephi in five minutes:

Introducing Gephi at JavaOne from gephi on Vimeo.

Announcing the Gephi Toolkit

We are announcing today the first release of the Gephi Toolkit. The Toolkit project packages essential modules (Graph, Layout, Filters, IO…) in a standard Java library, which any Java project can use for getting things done. The toolkit is just a single JAR that anyone could reuse in a Java program and script Gephi features.

The toolkit is the counterpart of the desktop application. Gephi’s user interface aims to be simple, intuitive and without command-line or scripting needed. The toolkit is made for people who want to:

• Script, automate features & reproduce the same procedure over and over
• Reuse Gephi features and algorithms in other projects and softwares
• Develop all types of mashups or web-services that deals with networks

A lot of new content is coming with the release of the Toolkit. A new portal appeared on the wiki, with documentation. Above all we provide demos and examples and a tutorial for newcomers. The cool thing is that it is very easy to use and this is all compatible with Gephi plugins. What is done for Gephi desktop can be reused in the toolkit.

Gephi is designed in a modular way and splitted into different modules. All features are wrapped into separated modules, for instance a module for the graph structure, a module for the layout algorithms and so on. Moreover business modules are separated from user interfaces modules. That allows to keep only business modules and remove UI without any problems. That is the purpose of the toolkit, which wraps only core modules and removes all the UI layer. So the toolkit is just taking what already exists in Gephi and packages it.

That is all thanks to the power of Java and Netbeans Platform. The way modular development is encouraged and the ability to manually extract modules from the Netbeans Platform is all thanks to the way they designed the architecture and use standards like ‘ant’ and plain Java. It’s a good occasion to say Kudos to them!

With the release of the toolkit, we are also moving to the AGPL license, as announced earlier. The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run the program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the program that it’s running. If what’s running there is your modified version of the program, the server’s users must get the source code as you modified it.