Building something from scratch is rarely a good idea. Especially in the rich world of web technologies full of solutions for problems we didn’t eve

How to Build a Graph Visualization Engine and Why You Shouldn’t

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2023-02-07 16:00:18

Building something from scratch is rarely a good idea. Especially in the rich world of web technologies full of solutions for problems we didn’t even know existed. In our first iteration of Memgraph Lab, we did just that — we used Vis.js for our graph visualization engine. But that solution turned into a nightmare because the library was deprecated and didn’t allow multithreading. User experience (UX) was a disaster since rendering a large graph would block the entire application. You can read about our troubles here. So this time around, in our pursuit to create the go-to interactive graph development environment, we made the difficult decision to create our own library — Orb. Let us take you on the journey of how we did it, along with the challenges that we faced.

First, we’ll cover the general architecture of the library — how Orb handles data structures and different views, and how we organized our developer API through events and callbacks.

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