Hans Muller's Blog

Grokker Java applet makes Monday's New York Times business section.

Would it be shameless to plug a new release of a interesting new search visualization product just because it happens to be featured in Monday's New York Times (May 9th)? In the Business section, on page C-3, with a nice color screenshot and a teaser at the top of page C-1? Perhaps it would. But only if I failed to mention a former colleague, who used to manage the J2SE client group, now works at Groxis, the company who produced this press-worthy Java client software. So far he hasn't agreed to provide any incentives in return for promoting the new free Grokker Applet front-end for Yahoo search. If the Groxis news page is any indication, they don't really need my help.

Grokker application screenshot with highbrow art search results.

Grokker is a visualization for search results that organizes matches into hierarchical groups, where the members of each group all belong to a category. As you can see in the screenshot above, categories are displayed as circles, membership by containment, relevance by scale, and so on. An enormous amount of information can be put on the screen at once, thanks in no small part to some expert use of Java2D. There's also support for dynamically filtering the results. So if you want exclude matches that are newer than 1997, you can just grab a slider and interactively exclude just as much of the past as suits your purposes. Grokker is available now as an applet for everyone, you'll find it on http://www.grokker.com/. It's also available as a stand-alone application. I've used screenshots of the stand-alone version from an somewhat dated Swing Sightings column because I'm lazy.

The library here at Sun provides a Grokker interface for our entire collection, as does the Stanford University library. I've talked to the librarian for Sun about it. Apparently Sun library patrons have found Grokker to be really effective; sometimes saving hours of time relative to conventional list-of-text search systems. The feedback from Stanford researchers has also been really positive. As a Java client developer I can honestly say that I'm pleased to hear that this Java applet is a useful tool; but did anyone notice the GUI's awesome rollover highlights? And the animated segues? And the snappy performance?

Grokker is a great example of what's possible with Java2D and Swing and the complete Java platform. And, it's a pretty good search visualization tool too.

Grokker Application Screenshot: drilling into the roll-over highlights.

Comments

• It's always great to see applets in the news...

  I particularly enjoy helping people remote their application's user interfaces as applets. When they see how easy it is to do, and how they look and work identically, it's like they rediscover the promise of Java all over again! :-)

  Posted by: cajo on May 10, 2005 at 05:02 PM

• What a dump idea. The images and things they have are all doable in JavaScript/CSS. A applet is a waste of time. Fails in my ie anyway. Who has time to confiqure for applets anymore?

  Posted by: smartinumcp on May 11, 2005 at 07:12 AM

• What a dumb idea. The images and things they have are all doable in JavaScript/CSS. A applet is a waste of time. Fails in my ie anyway. Who has time to confiqure for applets anymore?

  Posted by: smartinumcp on May 11, 2005 at 07:12 AM

• Not any more dumb than double-posting. :-)

  Seriously, though, it is disappointing to see that Javascript programs can appear faster to the user than applets. In fact, when I'm surfing the web, when I load a page, if I hear the hard drive grinding, my first thought is, "Oh boy, another applet." It's sad when there's all this overhead to start the VM for some tiny applet that does nothing more than scroll text like a ticker tape (yes, I know Grokker does more than move text around).

  That, I think, is what gets end-users frustrated with Java applications/applets, and is why we have trolls and detractors like this.

  Posted by: afishionado on May 11, 2005 at 08:57 AM

• I'm rough because the technology needs to be roughed up to become relevant. The idea of visual search maps was out there 3 years ago. Yawn. It didn't take over and seems to delivery pretty much useless knowledge. Plus being visual it eats up most of the screen with big circles w/ no data. What's the real difference of percentages vs. this? Be useful!

  Per the applet part the Swing part of Java consistently fails to deliver. 2d? Why not 3d? They've been replaying that CD demo thing for 2 years now. If JavaScript and CSS can blow away both applet functionality and performance then it's getting passed by.

  Posted by: smartinumcp on May 11, 2005 at 12:13 PM

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