Still wondering about directed graphs drawn from AppEngine

Question

With reference to another case of pretty much the same question I have, Brightside asked: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264157/library-to-render-directed-graphs-similar-to-graphviz-on-google-app-engine

The accepted answer was "canvis", which looks very cool from a rendering perspective, but canvis just does the drawing. It still needs to call graphvis binaries for doing the layout, not so? Or what am I missing, in order to make sense of the author's "Awesome! I just got it working on GAE. Thanks!" - possibly I will have to resort to manual layout via my own pure python code, when generating my graph specification in the dot language? (Else I'll resort to other options mentioned.)

Answer 1

Canvis doesn't call graphviz itself - it renders xdot directly in the browser. Of course you still have to have some way to generate xdot files, but canvis doesn't care where they come from.