Visualization of social networks within a Rich Internet Application

Robert Likar (2009) Visualization of social networks within a Rich Internet Application. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

Together with the growth of the World Wide Web’s popularity, connections become faster, browsers more efficient, and the market of web applications develops, increasing the web applications' versatility and their level of perfection. Rich web application offer better functionally and are slowly taking the place of desktop applications. The aim of this diploma thesis is to choose appropriate technology for development of rich web applications, along with an appropriate component for visualization of social networks. With this aim, this thesis not only presents different technologies for RIA development, but also defines the use of the GWT tool in great detail. The GWT tool enables simple development of web applications in a single language, Java. It is highly appropriate for development of enterprise web applications, mainly due to the advantage of merging the program code from the server side with the client's side into a common project. The use of social networks is an ideal way of enabling efficient and intuitive examination of people and connections between them. Visualization of social networks plays an integral role in their research and analysis. It is more than just narrow visualization of interesting images; it is mainly about generation of learnable situations and detection of important information. For this purpose the component Birdeye RaVis, designed with Adobe Flex technology was chosen. RaVis is a powerful and perfected component for outlining graphs or networks, which use XML files as their main data source. With the use of the GWT-Fabridge interface, we made sure that communication between two technologies, as different as GWT and Flex, did not present a problem.

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