One of the visualization techniques that people ignored is the treemap. A lot of our customers used our group table or pivot grid to display the data. What you don’t know is the same data can also be visualized in a treemap. And it will be more effective for your users to find out what they want to know.

Today I will do some code analysis on JIDE jars using Classycle (http://classycle.sourceforge.net/) and JIDE TreeMap. See below. Click on it to see a larger picture.

Some interesting facts:
1. The largest class is DefaultDockingManager (which is the largest individual rectangle)
2. The largest package is com.jidesoft.grid (which is the first/largest block)
3. The most used class (inside JIDE classes) is JideSwingUtilities, not surprise as it is a collection of many useful static methods. You can tell by the darkness of its red color
4. Top five packages are com.jidesoft.grid, com.jidesoft.plaf, com.jidesoft.chart, com.jidesoft.swing and com.jidesoft.combobox (the first five blocks).
5. The largest product is JIDE Grids. It’s com.jidesoft.grid is already the largest by itself but JIDE Grids is much bigger as it spans several packages – com.jidesoft.grid, com.jidesoft.combobox, com.jidesoft.list, com.jidesoft.filter, etc.

As you can see, it is much easier than looking into a table to dig out these facts. I used the class size as the size measurement when drawing the treemap. That’s why most of the facts are related to the size. You can use other values to find out other interesting facts.

Take a look at some large tables in your application. Maybe you can use the treemap to visualize them too.

Here is the link to the treemap product page (http://www.jidesoft.com/products/treemap.htm). You can also run our webstart demo to see some treemaps in action here.