[INFRA] Investigate how we could replace mxGraph

[tbouffard]

mxGraph has been announced as End Of Life on 2020-11-09, the mxgraph repository is now archived, the former development repository (mxgraph2) is no more available. There are some attempts to make mxGraph still alive, see https://github.com/jsGraph/mxgraph.

As the future of mxGraph is uncertain, let's investigate on lib that we could use as replacement.

Tasks

• [ ] Define criteria for a replacement (what we need based on the experience we have acquired with the mxGraph usage)
• [ ] List and compare candidates. Make this public
• [ ] Decide the podium and choose an eventual winner

POC conclusions

Cytoscape (#1082 and #1160) Great and open community, lot of contributors and resources NO GO: not enough extensibility for our use case. See https://github.com/process-analytics/bpmn-visualization-js/pull/1082#issuecomment-779724583.

G6 (#970) https://g6.antv.vision/en Highly customizable, provides all features (and more) our use case Issues

• Rollup integration issue and ES6 tree shaking not working well and we need it because the lib size is very large
• Development only lead by a single company (AntV https://antv.vision/en). We don't want to depend on decisions of a single individual/organization and suffer from EOL decisions as for mxGraph

August 2021 Decision

As there is a community initiative to resurrect mxGraph as maxGraph and we didn't find a replacement solution that fits all our needs, we have decided to keep the mxGraph integration for now. We are still watching evolution of both G6 and maxGraph and we will probably reopen this topic in a few months.

[tbouffard]

We have decided to evaluate https://js.cytoscape.org/ (PR #971) and https://g6.antv.vision/en (PR #970) in details

[tbouffard]

We may also check this list: https://github.com/anvaka/graph-drawing-libraries

[tbouffard]

Closing for now, see the August 2021 Decision in the description of the issue.