The G Graphics Library

For a Java program I'm writing (which I think I've mentioned/groused about elsewhere), I need to draw a few layered network diagrams (essentially binary trees turned on their sides), with a bit of customization. Part of that customization is that I want edges to run horizontally or vertically only (with right angle bends as needed), and I want to control layout (spacing). The Swing graphical toolkit provides everything necessary to paint on the screen, but I'm reluctant to spend the necessary time learning the ins and outs of drawing/painting with Swing. So I did some searching for libraries that would sit atop Swing and either provide mechanisms specifically for drawing graphs and networks, or at least provide a "higher level" drawing interface.

I have used JUNG with good success in the past for other applications, but neither JUNG nor JGraph (a similar library) seemed to give me the layout control I wanted (or, if they did, I could not figure out how). Skipping over various other blind alleys, which had me wondering whether I would spend more time looking for a library than it would take to master Swing, I eventually found G, described by its authors as

a generic graphics library built on top of Java 2D in order to make scene graph oriented 2D graphics available to client applications in a high level, easy to use way.

Note the phrase "easy to use", which (along with layout control) was my Holy Grail.

G, which is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), is a bit sparse on documentation. There is no user manual that I can find, and the Javadoc documentation, while comprehensive, does not provide as much descriptive material as a beginner might want. There are, however, some two dozen demonstration programs, which allowed me to infer much (though not all) of what I needed to know. The rest came from trial and error.

Once the basics are mastered, G does indeed provide a fairly easy to use toolkit for building two-dimensional graphics. There are some design decisions which may or may not suit the user. As one example, G provides support for dynamically panning and zooming scenes (graphs), but zooming does not change font sizes; text remains at its original size while the surrounding drawing elements expand or contract.

Bundled with G are two other classes, again documented only by their Javadoc (and by invocations in the sample programs).  The Geometry class provides various utility methods for geometric calculations, including factory methods for generating arrows, circles, ellipses, rectangles, circular or elliptical sectors, and stars. The Matrix4x4 class provides support for various mathematical operations on images, including scaling, rotation and translation (shifting).

The current version of G was released in December of 2009, and I see no indication that development is continuing, nor did I see any links to support forums or bug trackers. I think that I did encounter a bug, but found my own workaround. The factory methods in the Geometry class typically have two or more variants, with at least one using "device' coordinates (directly corresponding to pixels on the output device) and at least one using "world view" coordinates (using an arbitrary set of coordinates established by the user for his or her virtual canvas). The convention in G is that integers are device coordinates and double precision values are world coordinates. I had no problem using world coordinates to generate rectangles and stars, but my attempt to generate circles using world coordinates resulted in clipped ellipses with at least a few lines passing through the center. The workaround was to take the center and one point on the perimeter of the circle (for convenience, chosen directly left, right, up or down from the center), transform them from world to device coordinates, get the radius in device coordinates by subtracting, and then use the device-coordinates version of the factory method to generate the circle.

All that said, I now feel fairly comfortable using G, and I appreciate the work done by its authors and their releasing it open-source.