Visualization and Traversal of CPAN module dependencies

[J. Bobby Lopez]

Hey all,

While planning out another project, I came across some javascript tools which handle visualization of hierarchies, such as module dependencies or version control branches.

While this site has a lot of different visualization tools, I came across one in particular which might be useful for visualization of CPAN module dependencies.

Here it is: http://thejit.org/static/v20/Jit/Examples/Spacetree/example1.html

It doesn't seem to load the entire hierarchy, only the levels which you are viewing at any given time.

Controlling the colors used for each node means that we can color each dependency based on how popular/useful/buggy each module is.  If there's a lot of red in the dependency tree, then likely the initial (parent) module may not be stable enough for production, since it has a lot of shady dependencies.

Curious what you guys thought of the idea, or if you had any similar thoughts in mind.

-jbl