Why choose JUNG?

1. How is JUNG different from...

   1. ... UCINET?

      UCINET is a widely-used application among social networks researchers for performing standard social network analysis techniques to graphs.
      However, UCINET cannot be embedded into applications: you can't call UCINET in an end-user display.
      JUNG provides facilities to dynamically change graphs, to programatically call code, and to output the results as the program continues.

   2. ... PAJEK?

      PAJEK is a stand-alone tool for visualizing and analyzing networks. JUNG provides many algorithms that PAJEK does not (and, currently vice versa), and--as noted for UCINET--is easily incorporated into network applications.
      JUNG is capable of both reading and writing simple PAJEK-format files. (JUNG's PAJEK file reader does not currently support the entire PAJEK file format.)

   3. ... R? http://www.r-project.org

      R is a specialized programming language geared primarily toward the statistics community, offering a broad set of statistical routines. JUNG is intended for a less-specialized audience, and, as a pure JAVA solution, is embeddable within web browsers and pre-existing applications.

   4. ... GFC? http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/gfc

      GFC is a graph drawing-oriented package released by IBM. It is specific to using Java's AWT/Swing, and contains few graph manipulation algorithms.

   JUNG is open-source, free, and has a wide variety of algorithms available. Better, it's easily extensible through a widely-documented API: if it's not there yet, you can add it yourself.

2. What types of graphs does JUNG support?

JUNG supports graphs, general k-partite graphs (of which bipartite graphs are a special case), hypergraphs, and has limited support for trees.