Design Elements

Here I am listing several design questions/suggestions. Feel free to comment.

Design elements:

1. I am proposing a GUI dialog which will allow the users to select which network metrics they want to run on the network, see the first post for a list of metrics. The user can select to run all or some (possibly only one) metric to run on their network.
   
   
2. Two modes: Estimation or Exact.
   Given that some of the metrics run in N*N*N (graph distances) and that the some of the networks Gephi users may be interested in may be quite large (100,000+ nodes) users may not always want to run the metrics to their full extent and instead be satisfied with estimations. For example there is a graph diameter estimation that users will most likely be interested in running.
   
   
3. We can also provide a mechanism to parallelize the metrics using Java threads, to improve the run time performance.
   
   
4. We will probably want to present a Task Monitor to the users while the metric(s) are running.
   
   
   

Charting

I've been asked to survey some of the existing charting java libraries to see which library best matches are requirements and will not take a tremendous amount of time or effort. After reviewing the API's, documentation, tutorials, etc. I recommended JFreeChart for the following reasons:
1) It is well known which can yield more credibility than other lesser known charting libraries.
2) I have some experience with JFreeChart already so hopefully that will reduce the amount of time needed to integrate the library.
3) It has all of the charting features that we will require: pie charts, histograms, and scatter-plots.
4) It also produces "pretty" charts.

Of course this is one aspect of the GUI that we will need to work on.