Richard Monson-Haefel of Curl, Inc. discusses data visualization on the Java and Curl programming langugages:

The topic of data visualization was brought up a couple of time before (1, 2) on this site. Data visualization is becomming a very hot area of research for user experience experts. Personally, I find the field fascinating.

While researching data visualization a while back I discovered the Java processing language which is an open source project at processing.org. The Java processing language is a really we’ll designed domain specific language that can be used to quickly create data visualizations that have wonderful designer aesthetics. The data visualizations run in the Java virtual machine as applets in your browser. It shows that Java is still in the running as a RIA.

I’ve always believed that Curl would make a great data visualization platform. It’s so powerful that it could handle some really huge data sets and it has first class 2D and 3D libraries.

You can run the curl applications and see the source code at my web site.