Get rid of Linkurious.js

[tanius]

Currently, this project uses a fork of Linkurious.js. Linkurious is used, at the least, for all the graph drawing in the "Detangler View" section. (Proof: when setting up Graphryder Dashboard without installing Linkurious.js, these graph drawing areas will simply stay empty and shrink to a minimal height. The application does not complain during the build process though, which should be considered a bug.)

Linkurious.js is a fork of Sigma.js, a graph drawing library, adding 20-30 plugins and extended core functions to it.

Now the fate of Linkurious.js, albeit an open source library, has been … hilarious 🤣 Here we go:

1. The repository page greets you with a message:

   This repository is unmaintained and deprecated. Use it at your own risks.

2. When you switch to the develop branch (the most recent one), you see a hint about what is supposed to come after it:

   status: DEPRECATED! More info at https://linkurio.us/ogma-js-library-large-scale-graph-visualization/

3. At that page, we finally get to know the full scale of the catastropy:

   Deprecation of linkurious.js

   Ogma comes with all the features of linkurious.js, which becomes deprecated. We will continue to support existing customers of linkurious.js until they migrate to Ogma.

   How to get it

   Ogma is available in a proprietary license only. Contact us to evaluate it!

4. So, the death of an open source product. Let's shortly look at the company which made this possible … it must be one of these pivoting startups, right? Oh, yea, right:

   Linkurious Enterprise is an on-premises graph visualization and analysis platform. Fraud, intelligence or cyber analysts use it to detect and investigate threats in large and complex datasets. (source)

   Hahahaha! 😆 Now this is … bullshit. To sell to so-called decision makers. Graph visualization and analysis is certainly an application agnostic technology and should be marketed as such. But, you know, "let's find a way to boost sales", right? Hahaha!

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Ok let's leave this chapter behind us and move to a proper open source Graph library. Probably the simplest would be to switch back to the original, Sigma.js, from which the dead project above was a fork. Especially since the project also includes Sigma.js as a dependency already (installed by bower install).

Some more candidates to choose from are listed in this nice overview.

[naisanzaa]

Dam. Linkurious.js is so dead. Looking for alternatives to Neo4j builtin browser.