Porting Functionality of prefuse to Android

Abstract Information visualization is of great importance in order to allow users to display complex and large amounts of data. It has a long history on the desktop computer, and therefore there are already numerous tools and frameworks that satisfy the needs of the majority of users. Because of the proliferation of mobile devices in recent years and because of the improvement of said mobile devices with regard to performance and screen quality, the demand for information visualization on mobile devices has increased. Since this is a new area, there are relatively few tools and frameworks for this purpose. The topic of this paper is introduced by displaying the already existing tools and frameworks in Android. Then their functionality and options are briefly explained. Furthermore, the structure of prefuse, one of the most successful desktop frameworks concerning information visualization, is analyzed. In the course of this analysis, a review of the actual source code is added to the information that has been obtained from the State of the Art on prefuse. Particular attention is paid to used design patterns. Finally, the conducted porting and its final result, AndroidPrefuse, is described. In general, the architecture of AndroidPrefuse after porting has remained the same as prefuse. To demonstrate the successful porting, a simple scatterplot in AndroidPrefuse has been implemented or rather ported. In addition, the following questions regarding the porting are answered: Which options for the porting were available? Why were the AWT and Swing libraries adopted for AndroidPrefuse? What challenges have been encountered during porting, and how were they accomplished? Which prefuse parts were completely adopted, and which were only partially or not adopted at all?