Modelling Tools

Aisee
DaVinci
EVE
Graphlet
GraphViz
TouchGraph
VCG
VGJ

AiSee

A Graph Visualiser. No edit functionality in the tool.

Designed primarily for viewing the output from other programs, such as compilers.

Input is from a text file in its own format of GDL - extenstion of the VCG text format. It isn't hard to construct the text files.

This tool allows nodes to have a little more information than some of the other academic spinoffs (Graphlet, Davinici). A node can have 3 alternate labels info1, info2, info3

The following export formats are offered: PBM, PPM, BMP, PostScript.

Visualisation can be done via flat or fisheye view.

Many different layout options.

The visualiser supports folding and unfolding of subgraphs.

It seems like a fairly robust product that could serve its target market well.

Given the prices associated with commercial use I'm not sure that this is a particularly relevant tool for testers given that testers want to manipulate the graph and construct paths, not just visualise it.

Evaluation is a 3.7 meg download

Pricing (see website for latest prices)
single user license on CDROM EUR 505.-(US$ 459.55)
single user license via email EUR 395.- (US$ 359.45)
single user license for educational research EUR 237.-(US$ 215.67)

There is also a free license for academic use but the tool has some limitiations. I'm not sure what they are.

Review Date 8/11/2001

[Freshmeat] [.de] [.com]

DaVinci

This was originally designed for Unix systems and has been written in TCL.

The main program is the davinciPresenter. All other tools are connected to this program at run time either via Unix Pipes or TCP/IP. And although this is a windows conversion I couldnt' get this to work under Windows 2000, this is probably just something that I did wrong.

All the usual layout options are present and it all seems competent.

Looking through the help files, the editor seems fairly standard but again nodes and links are limited to a label description.

Uses its own "term representation" format for Graphs. There are command line tools supplied to convert GML files to davinci format and to pretty print/flatten the davinci text files.

Normal windows export functions to gif, tiff, jpg, png.

It seems like a fairly adequate graph editing and visualisation tool assuming that you can get it to work for you. If all you want to do is label nodes and graphs then it might be worthwhile but for testing work, I think the requirements to add more attributes to nodes and edges will generally make the tool unsuitable.

4MB Download

Quantity	Node-Locked	Floating
1	495 Euro	995 Euro
2	895 Euro	1795 Euro
5	1995 Euro	3995 Euro
10	3595 Euro	7195 Euro

Free for educational use. Check web site for up to date pricing.

Review Date 8/11/2001

EVE

This is a tiny vector drawing program - 54Kb

It has a very basic user interface, consisting as it does of a work area and a menu bar. This no doubt is one of the factors which contributes to its small size, that and being written in hand crafted assembler.

If you need a modeler fast which was free, and small then this might well fit that need.

It might even have a use as an organisational work pad as the drawing elements can represent executable programs with command lines.

It will also export sections as bitmap, emf and wmf. Although when I was evaluating it I could only import the emf format into visio. But the manual does say that some windows applications have problems with wmf.

Worth having in your emergency toolkit.

Review Date 8/11/2001

License Type:

True freeware. No nag screens, no timeout, no limitations.

Graphlet

This is an academic project gone commercial, although it is still free for academic use.

As an editor it has some nice functionality, select an area to zoom in. Click on a button to "find the graph". And it is very quick to knock up a simple graph.

There are plenty of automated layout options to clean it up for you.

GML should be a pretty flexible language description but this tool only allows node and edge labels to be maintained.

As a result of being written in TCL it has the GraphScript language extension which allows the user to extend the tool with home written TCL code.

The route from an X-windows tool is very obvious with the export to xfig, postscript, and graphed file.

Plenty of documentation is available on the academic version of the web site.

Given its price I can't really recommend it for commercial testing use unless you know TCL and really want to write a tool in TCL to provide the customised functionality that you require.

3.3 Meg download

Free for academic use.
10,000 Euro $ for permanent commercial license. Email distributor for up to date pricing.

Review Date 8/11/2001

GraphViz AT&T

The AT&T graph toolkit.

This has dot and neato which when given a graph file in at textual "dot" format will generate a file which has the graph neatly lain out. The output file can be anything from a gif, to postscript, to a text file with the co-ordinates.

The distribution also provides dotty and lneato which are rudimentary graphical editors for the dot graphs. Nodes are added by clicking on the workspace and links by doing a cntrl+mousedrag from node to node.

The labels have to be edited in the saved .dot file but this isn't to hard to learn.

The dot text file is pretty easy to parse if you want to add extra attributes to the nodes and labels. These attributes are retained after saving and loading the diagram into dotty for editing.

Recommended.

A very quick way of documenting a graph. And it is free.

Review Date 8/11/2001

Touchgraph

An interesting on-line graph tool written in Java and Perl.

The link browser takes an XML file which defines the graph. This is a very easy format and the system itself will help you edit it. Although most of the graph has to be constructed by hand in XML.

It is basically a set of links which can appear in the top half of a framed window while the graph is fluidly maintained in the lower half of the window. Try it, it is very unusual.

Although I've never used this on a project I can easily imagine it being used to present test models over an intranet. But I might well be trying to think of a use for something which I just think is particularly groovy.

On the right job, this could be perfect. (The Compendium Developments Sitemap has been written using Touchgraph)

Review Date 8/11/2001

VCG

I haven't been able to download the windows versions of this tool yet.

This is the tool that aiSee was based on.

VGJ

This is a browser embedded Java applet for drawing graphs.

It doesn't have any automated layout functionality but it does have a pretty easy user interface for drawing the graphs. It uses much the same process as dotty - click to add a node, cntrl+drag to add links. But it also allows the editing of the node attributes in the tool rather than just the text file.

The graph is stored in GML format and the textual representation can be edited in the tool.

Because it runs in the browser it may not allow save and load on your machine and you may have to use the "edit text representation" function to save and load (cut and paste) the graph from the tool to disk.

It has some rudimentary layout options but these work fine for quickly constructing a graph.

The nodes can only be linked with a single edge and any extra attributes that you add to the GML file are lost when the program edits the graph. Export is only to postscript and GML.

It is worth looking at for constructing simple graphs and is now part of the co-operative workflow project.