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Erlang Process Visualization using d3.js #3

Open oakmac opened 8 years ago

oakmac commented 8 years ago

Erlang / OTP applications are organized using light-weight processes that communicate via message passing and share a parent-child relationship of ownership and control.

This tree-like structure is well-suited to visualization, with some interesting design challenges around the number of nodes being displayed at a time, explorability of a large tree-space, information density vs noise, etc. There is also the interesting idea of process / system management through the same interface that is visualizing the data: an interface that allows for both system understanding and control.

There are currently some tools for doing Erlang process visualization in a GUI, but I think there is probably room for another ;)

d3.js + web technologies are well-suited for such a visualization and management tool.

cc: @mrallen1

jadeallenx commented 8 years ago

There's already "Observer" which comes natively with Erlang but it requires wxWidgets to be built to use and not everyone compiles that. So I agree there is definitely room for that kind of visualization using d3.js and other tools.  There is also https://github.com/krestenkrab/erlubi but its backend is this proprietary visualization tool that isn't available any more.  So I would look at building a d3.js backend for erlubi!

oakmac commented 8 years ago

Relevant project: https://github.com/koudelka/visualixir