13/06/2008

Anaximander, a Notes 8 plug-in for visualising the connections between Notes Databases

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One of the perennial problems faced by all Notes developers is understanding the connections between different Notes Databases.

Anaximander is a plug-in I'm writing for a client which visualises the connections between Notes Databases. Here's the very first output from the very first version. Shown in the picture are the connections between about 550 Notes Databases. I thought it would be complex but not this complex!

Clicking on a target database highlights which source databases have one or more connections to the target database.

A picture named M2

The next step is to improve the visualisation so that information about the connected design elements is shown in a tree view. The Java model driving the graph already has the information so it just needs a TableTree to display it.

I'd also like to filter the display to make the graph simpler. Perhaps by only displaying n generations of children from the target database so in the picture above one would only see the yellow nodes.

Oh, if you're wondering, Anaximander was pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who created one of the first maps of the world. Cool name, cool dude!