Submitted by lubrifix on Fri, 11/14/2008 - 16:29

So we needed a way to automatically output the network created by the nodereferences on an iphone. Normally, I would have used flex to do this, as it has a nice programming paradigm (object oriented) and loads quickly in a browser. Unfortunately, the wise men at apple do not allow flash to work it's magic, so another solution had to be found.
Wouter one day sent me a link to a Durpal content filter for Graphviz. Graphviz is a command-line tool creating static network visualisations based on text files. For example, you can create a jpg network representation based on a text represenation. The content filter didn't work, but Graphviz did. In the infideconstans custom durpal module, I wrote a function that outputs the relevant content in the system as a *.dot file. This file is then converted every 15 minuntes as a part of a cron job which was set on the debian server itself.