Tools used to create "The Secret Lives of Numbers"

"The Secret Lives of Numbers" is a Java applet with a very interesting visualization that shows the distribution of the numbers开发者_JS百科 through Internet (please click in the previous link to see it. It is quite nice).

I want to implement a similar user interface, in terms of having a user interface with the possibility of zooming in and out and panning, and a similar "look and feel".

Any idea about what tools or libraries might have been utilized in this project?

Edit: I am mostly ignorant about Java. I usually program in Python. Since I want to use an applet, I think is would be easier to do this using Java. It is also a good excuse to learn Java.

---

That visualization is really nice! I just looked in the .jar file of their applet, and they did not use any library to do this. At least no public available. Everything is implemented in a handful of classes, and by looking at their names you can get an idea of the bits and pieces you might want to implement to get something similar:

Balloon.class
ColorScheme.class
DataSource.class
GraphCanvas.class
NumApplet$FloatFormat.class
NumApplet.class
NumberPhraseConnection.class
PlotCanvas.class
PlotGenerator.class
ThumbCanvas.class
VectorFont$FPoint.class
VectorFont.class