README

PROTOVIS-JAVA RESEARCH PROTOTYPE

Protovis-Java is a partial implementation of the Protovis toolkit in the Java
programming language. It is a research project exploring how Protovis'
declarative approach to visualization design can be implemented and optimized
in a statically-typed, object-oriented language. We demonstrate how to support
rich visualizations without requiring a toolkit-specific data model and extend
Protovis to enable declarative specification of animated transitions. To
support cross-platform deployment, we introduce rendering and event-handling
infrastructures decoupled from the runtime platform.

For more information about the design of the system, see our InfoVis 2010
paper: http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/protovis-design

This software package provides only a partial implementation of the full
Protovis language and includes only selected subcomponents explored during
our research. Please note that this is *only* a research prototype! It is not
intended to be a production-ready toolkit and we do not provide software
support as of this time. The code is also missing many of the library routines
familiar to Protovis-Javascript users. For a complete, production-ready
system, we encourage you to use the fully supported JavaScript implementation,
available at http://protovis.org

We provide the code here freely for others to use and modify, and as
supporting material for our research paper and benchmarks. Protovis-Java is
released as open source software under a BSD license. Please see the
included protovis-license.txt file for the licensing terms.

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The software consists of 3 sub-projects:

protovis            -> The Protovis-Java language implementation
protovis-benchmarks -> Code for performance benchmarks in the research paper
protovis-examples   -> Example Protovis applications

Each sub-project includes .classpath and .project files for use in Eclipse.

The "build" directory contains pre-compiled jar files and dependencies, as
well as scripts to launch the various examples. The "lib" folder includes
platform-specific JOGL 1.1 libraries for Mac OS X. To run examples under
Windows or Linux, you will need to download platform-specific binaries for
those systems and place them in the folder. You can search for these files at
https://jogl.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=9260&expandFolder=9260&folderID=0