I have a program that runs in Terminal and I'd like to have a graph window open like in JPanel. I don't care if it's rendered by chrome and then the panel pops up, I'd just like to know if this is possible? Node.js says it uses JS not in a browser, but the graphing modules like Plotly do use the browser.
If you definitely need a separate window that is not part of a browser session, you'll probably have no choice but to use a more verbose implementation.
A straightforward approach would be to use https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/ which will allow you to open a native window to render a webpage.
Alternatively, you could go with http://phantomjs.org/ which would allow you to render the graph offscreen, then render it to an image and have that image opened by the OS.