A HTML and Javascript widget to embed a phylogeny in a web page.

Example

A demonstration of a very large tree being displayed is here: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/tvwidget/mammal.html . This is one of the mammal supertrees published by Bininda-Emonds et al. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature05634 (the first tree in Supplementary Figure 1).

Background

For background on this project, see the series of blog posts on iPhylo:

• http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/08/visualising-very-big-trees-part-v.html
• http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/08/visualising-very-big-trees-part-iv.html
• http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/08/visualising-very-big-trees-part-iii.html
• http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/08/visualising-very-big-trees-part-ii.html
• http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/08/viewing-very-large-trees.html

The goal is to have a simple, HTML-only widget to display phylogenies of up to 1000s of nodes. The widget is generated by a C++ program that takes a NEXUS or Newick format tree and generates one or more bitmap "tiles". These are then displayed in a scrollable viewing window, inspired by Zoomify and Google Maps.

Related projects

PhyloWidget is a very slick Java applet for displaying phylogenies. ATV is well known Java applet for displaying Newick and NHX format trees.

Credits

The tree reading code comes from my TreeView X project, which in turn uses an early version of Paul Lewis's NEXUS Class Library (the current version of of NCL is here http://sourceforge.net/projects/ncl/). tvwidget uses Magick++ to create the bitmaps.

Thanks also to Vince Smith for hassling me to finish this, and Simon Rycroft for testing the first release.