Presenting FATuM

FATuM is a 2D visualisation library. It has been designed as a middleware for visualization. Its two main purposes are

• Scalabity to have many visual elements rendered

• Smooth animations even when the number of elements to animate grows

These objectives are achieved thanks to two main features :

• An abstraction of common visualization primitives into Marks and Connections

• The use of double buffering for information visualization to handle animations

For details about those two features, see the corresponding sections.

Data management

Fatum does not include any data management utilities. Its only purpose is efficient visualization rendering. It is up to the user to maintain a correspondance between its data and the visualization handled by Fatum. This avoids tight coupling between the visualization and a specific data model.

Accessing the library

After including fatum.js in your html page, the Fatum global object will be defined. The Fatum library is then initialized asynchronously. The addInitListener(function) function allows users to add callbacks to be executed when the library is initialized. The global code structure of an application using Fatum is thus like this :

<script src="fatum.js"></script>
<script>
    Fatum.addInitListener(function() {
        /* your code here */
    });
</script>

If you want to get Fatum from a different URL than the current folder, you need to add some options to enable Fatum to retrieve auxiliary files :

<script>
    var prefix = "www.labri.fr/perso/aperrot/resources/fatum/"
    Fatum = {memoryInitializerPrefixURL:prefix, filePackagePrefixURL:prefix};
</script>
<script src="http://www.labri.fr/perso/aperrot/resources/fatum/fatum.js"></script>