Graphing APIs

I've been pondering writing a rather generic mapping API for most MUDS and then attaching a GUI mapper to it. Now, the graphs and djikstra's and all that pretty much takes care of itself, but I am looking for some tool to make drawing the graph easier. What I've turned up so far are several commercial tools running from the 100s to 1000s of dollars, and some open source tools, the most promising of which is JGraph. (www.jgraph.com)

This has the downside for me of being written in Java, but this is still workable. I'm wondering however if anyone else knows of similar projects, maybe even custom build for MUDs and so forth. I want a GUI component, not just output to BMP, SVg, etc..., which can automatically layout the graph, and take into account hints on where things should be placed (n,e,s,w, etc).

I'm playing around with JGraph right now, but in the end I might end up writing a very basic custom component which can display things properly.

Thanks -Tsunami

Probably not what you're looking for, but...

http://luagraph.luaforge.net/

This might be overkill for what you want, but I played around with http://prefuse.org/ and liked it quite a bit. I didn't try things like position hints, though. (I was playing with assigning different weights to edges to make nodes further apart or closer together.) It's also in Java. (Why is that a downside?)