GoJS 2.2: JavaScript and TypeScript Diagramming library | Hacker News Reader

GoJS 2.2: JavaScript and TypeScript Diagramming library

gojs.net

86 pointssimonsarris20 comments

In a past life I spent many months deep in this library. There were some good things about it. Documentation is decent, performance was good, and their support was great.

But still, it was a massive hindrance not to be able to dig into the library source when needed. I spent days grokking decompiled library code in order to get done what needed getting done.

When it came time to grow the team, I couldn't in good conscience ask new hires to invest in learning all of this proprietary bespoke SVG-like-but-different ecosystem, knowing it would be frustrating and learnings would likely not be fundamentally applicable to other future endeavors.

just clicking around, i cant even tell what the license is in the free evalustion stuff.

it definitely looks professional and probably worth it, but the site itself doesnt seem to sell any bootstrap model.

What did you use instead?

They have a non-standard source license. I doubt the legal would be excited engineering team to adopt some of these in the codebase.

https://gojs.net/latest/license.html

(I make GoJS)

Although several companies do negotiate custom license agreements with us, it is not very common. Almost all the names here use the standard license: https://nwoods.com/sales/customers.html

I think the problem is that you need to subscribe to know the pricing model, I don't try anything that don even show the pricing up-front and what difference licenses they offer, is like they want you to make into production before you notice that you have unlicensed software and pull the trigger if you dont pay. that's is really nasty business model.

Looks like their pricing is here: https://nwoods.com/sales/index.html

Which is behind the ‘Buy’ button in the top nav.

Not sure what happened in the grandparent comment, but it’s very much transparent and easy to find.

It also has a neat calculator, so it’s easy to figure out exact pricing for various scenarios, which is quite unlike so many closed libraries I’ve seen.

Running in dev mode it also has a visible watermark on it, which says “GoJs evaluation © Northwoods Software. Not for distribution or production use nwoods.com”, meaning there’s almost zero chance that you wouldn’t notice at dev time that you’d need to license this before putting it into production.

Not to be confused with GopherJS, the Go->Javascript compiler https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs

Huh... The graph editing is coming from inside the browser! https://gojs.net/latest/learn/interactivity.html

This one has a better license: https://github.com/clientIO/joint

And this one is nice too: https://github.com/bpmn-io/diagram-js

My favorite diagramming software is yEd graph editor. My favorite feature: automatic layout (decreasing overlapping lines, etc).

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

despite the name, this confusingly have nothing to do with the go programming language

We started with Go++ (C++) more than two decades ago, and went on to make Java, .NET, and JavaScript versions of the library. "Go" here stands for Graph Object, GraphObject being the base class for drawn objects.

Well that's to be expected if you name your language Go. It's not exactly distinctive, is it?

Their github repo goes back to 1.4.0 or so around Apr 2014; their changelog goes back to 1.0.0. Go 1.0 was released March 2012. GopherJS' first commit is showing as Aug 2013. I'm not sure what GoJS' first release is but it seems likely to me it predated the Go project that really looks like "GoJS" and plausible that it predated Go 1.0 entirely.

So it looks like just one of those things.

I also can't find proof, but I think Go the language was previously essentially Limbo the language at Bell Labs in the Plan9 OS world, and when the team moved to Google they updated Limbo naming it Go.

It seems (from simonsarris comments) that GoJS was created in the Limbo naming era, and is itself an acronym.

For those interested in seeing the call graph within your TypeScript code, try TypeScript Call Graph

https://github.com/whyboris/TypeScript-Call-Graph

Is this not a go library?

It looks very easy to use. I might have to use this for something.

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