Show HN: GoJS - Interactive Canvas Diagramming Library | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GoJS - Interactive Canvas Diagramming Library

gojs.net

48 pointssimonsarris14 comments

We have been looking at it and currently use the WinForm based product from you guys.

Biggest issue we see right now is print output. We need good large format printing. Since it completely canvas based any print output is going to be raster, which will not scale up and use large amount of memory if made at any decent DPI.

We had the same issue when looking at the Silverlight version, all raster based, printing looked bad and took forever with large memory usage. You guys pretty much said no to using Silverlight 5's vector print capabilities.

I would seriously look at an SVG based renderer and/or at least an SVG export function allowing for resolution independent vectors mainly for printing but also for saving.

Secondary but not by far and related is PDF export. You guy recommend Phantomjs for server side PDF generation. This isn't a bad solution, but again it hampered by the raster rendering, SVG based rendering would make this a workable solution as I believe Phantom will do PDF vectors from SVG.

Your most direct competitor that we see is Y-files, and their solution does SVG rendering of the canvas, has great layout, looks good and can even save GraphML that can be loaded in their other products.

Our Silverlight product does support vector printing in Silverlight 5, thought it depends on the printer driver that the client has.

SVG output is a planned feature for GoJS.

I have to ask (+ be safe in the knowledge my plug is no worse than Simon's - Hello Northwoods \0/), how come HN folks find GoJS and yFiles and not so much our product mxGraph (www.jgraph.com). We've been doing this library since 2005, the others went into production in 2012 (I think). We seem to attract the Enterprises, but not so much the general devs. If anyone is feeling critical, does our site simply not make it clear what we do?

And yes, we export to SVG client-side and also to PDF in Java :).

I'm a programmer who's into graphs, the data structure.

When I first pulled up your site I saw the logo in the upper left which is an array of dots. Then I saw most of the entire page covered in logos of completely unrelated companies. The image changed to show me an Earth with another grid of dots. I didn't wait around for the 3rd animated slide, but now I see it looks like a scissors mechanism or DNA or something. I see mottos like "connecting the dots" and "ultimate diagramming tool".

The only "diagramming tool" I've used are Visio and that OpenOfficeOrg one.

On the other hand, when I visit http://www.gojs.net/latest/index.html , my reaction is "HOLY SHIT THESE PEOPLE HAVE 10 DIFFERENT WAYS TO MAKE GRAPHS PROGRAMMATICALLY IN JS"

yFiles has been around for many years, and the yWorks free-to-use diagramming tool based on it named yEd is in my use-it-everyday list.

I was referring to the release dates of the web native products, yFiles HTML and GOJs, the companies are indeed all much older.

yEd seems to be really good, thanks for the pointer MaggieL ...

You need many more samples, much better docs and a user forum would help.

I will say we are looking at your product as well. Your print support looks great with nice browser based preview and support for large format printing. Your server side .Net component for PDF conversion sounds good, but there is almost no information on it on the site, again a doc problem.

It works pretty nice. It looks so-so. But it seems a little pricey to me. $1350 for a single, internal app & $8385 for unlimited apps forever.[1] That feels pretty high.

[1] http://www.nwoods.com/sales/ordering.htm

What's comparable for less?

Y-Files is really nice but even more expensive: http://www.yworks.com/

D3 could be made to do a lot of this stuff, but you would have to build it, time = money.

I don't know what is comparable for less. But both of these are expensive. And there is nothing wrong with that. It seems people are paying it. Just my opinion that the price tag is high.

it's cheaper than most per-seat licensing schemes.

Looks very nice, but -- any plans to release a community / OSS version?

My thoughts exactly. Looks very nice but pricey.

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