Force Layout with Canvas by mbostock

This example demonstrates rendering a D3 force-directed graph using Canvas rather than SVG. The performance is slightly better than SVG, but unlike the SVG version, the nodes in this one are not draggable.

index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<body>
<script src="//d3js.org/d3.v3.min.js"></script>
<script>

var width = 960,
    height = 500;

var canvas = d3.select("body").append("canvas")
    .attr("width", width)
    .attr("height", height);

var force = d3.layout.force()
    .size([width, height]);

d3.json("graph.json", function(error, graph) {
  if (error) throw error;

  var context = canvas.node().getContext("2d");

  force
      .nodes(graph.nodes)
      .links(graph.links)
      .on("tick", tick)
      .start();

  function tick() {
    context.clearRect(0, 0, width, height);

    // draw links
    context.strokeStyle = "#ccc";
    context.beginPath();
    graph.links.forEach(function(d) {
      context.moveTo(d.source.x, d.source.y);
      context.lineTo(d.target.x, d.target.y);
    });
    context.stroke();

    // draw nodes
    context.fillStyle = "steelblue";
    context.beginPath();
    graph.nodes.forEach(function(d) {
      context.moveTo(d.x, d.y);
      context.arc(d.x, d.y, 4.5, 0, 2 * Math.PI);
    });
    context.fill();
  }
});

</script>