On a related note, Safari for Windows is sadly getting bad reports thus far (sadly because I think we’ve gone from an IE monoculture to a FF/IE duopoly, and I’d love to see more competition among browsers).

There is another SVG-based graphing calculator, but it’s a Firefox extension (which may or may not be more convenient, depending on your location and browser of choice).

On a Pentium 2.13 GHz M processor with 2 GB RAM, this version vectorizes images at an average rate of 0.55 mega pixels per second.

The free alternatives are, of course, potrace and autotrace (and see this comparison).

I think a discussion of the underlying wz_jsgraphics library (which Depicter.com currently also uses) is in order. First of all, the good: this approach works in all Javascript-enabled browsers (in particular, Flash is not needed). But wz_jsgraphics is rather inflexible: it’s merely a compiler for a few graphics primitives (lines, filled rectangles and XY-alligned ellipses) to an “assembly” language consisting of stacked DIVs. Because the library doesn’t keep track of the DIVs associated with each primitive, there’s no way to undo a shape (short of clearing the entire drawpad). wz_jsgraphics can also be slow (anything but rectangles and horizontal / vertical lines requiring large number of DIVs). However, these shortcomings aren’t fatal for a diagramming application.

Open jACOB is supposed to be a bigger framework, including a server-side part, though at the moment there isn’t much to see besides Draw2D. Overall, this is a promising start; hopefully this project will stay active and yield (further) useful results.

While Opera and Firefox have native SVG support, Internet Explorer, which still has the dominant market share, has no good alternatives (Mark Finkle’s VML-based SVG emulation is only a start). This is sure to spark outrage among application developers (though, to be honest, everyone knows that other than Flash or DHTML, there is no safe way).

Update: Adobe has yielded to pressure and agreed to continue distributing the plugin indefinitely (though there will be no further releases, in particular no Vista version).

This technique, of course, creates only right triangles aligned with the x and y axis. But you can cover any triangle (and, by extension, any polygon) with a collection of right triangles.

Another sticking point is the licensing. You need to contact JGraph to obtain a copy of the Javascript source (simply downloading the files used by the online demo does not give you a license). While non-commercial licenses are free, a commercial license will run you into the thousands of dollars, depending on the number of end-users.

As far as technology, a quick look in mxClient.js reveals that mxGraph seems to use either SVG or (for Internet Explorer) VML:

isBrowserSupported:function(){
return mxClient.IS_VML||mxClient.IS_SVG;
}

This begs the question of why mxGraph does not work with Opera, which supports SVG just fine.

Overall, I think that, while mxGraph might be a fine bit of work, it suffers in terms of cross-browser support and licensing restrictions. You may want to hold your breath before basing your project on this library. It’s possible that something more convenient will come out (or that mxGraph itself will address its shortcomings).