

xCharts - A D3-Based Library For Building Custom Charts and Graphs - Hirvesh
http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts/

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hosay123
These libraries all look so very pretty, but with the exception of dygraphs,
explode horribly given anything but the most superficial of data sets.

Speedy fetching/rendering/interaction of 10,000 samples for a handful of
variables is always going to suck when every sample of every variable requires
its own object with a handful of properties.

As for the usefulness of charts displaying only 4 or 5 data points.. well,
you're really not gaining much from visual representation of such a tiny set,
other than 'oooh that's pretty' feel-good factor.

~~~
VeejayRampay
Well isn't that a very positive comment. At which point do you see a link to a
library that someone took time to code and polish and decide "now would be a
good moment to shit all over it"??

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hosay123
In order to draw some boxes it (and many like it) require upwards of 10 heap
allocations along with gobs of animation and sugar per 4 straight lines
rendered on a 2D canvas, the result being they're useless for rendering
actually large data sets – the very kind that benefit most from summary visual
representation.

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nextw33k
I just completed a charting update to an application. I ended up using
HighChart because of backward compatibility with IE8, which is still in major
use in corporations.

xCharts doesn't offer anything over highcharts that I can see. SVG Support
coming to IE9 was great but it will be a few years yet before we can depend on
SVG.

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rowanseymour
xCharts is offering itself free even for commercial use unlike HighCharts

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gingerlime
It looks nice, but perhaps not as comprehensive as Rickshaw
<http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/> \- also based on d3. Of course there
are so many different charting libraries, it's really hard to choose, but I
guess it depends on your needs.

~~~
polskibus
I just checked Rickshaw, their main page throws a lot of js errors in Google
Chrome 24 in the console, making the examples unusable. Can anyone recommmend
a more stable, D3-based charting library ?

~~~
andrewingram
The Rickshaw page is working fine for me in Chrome Canary (currently at Chrome
25) and Chrome 23, there's a single JS error but it's not preventing the
examples from loading. Are you sure something else isn't the problem?

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binarycheese
Have you checked the JavaScript console?

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andrewingram
yup, that's where I saw the single error.

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flog
Could someone explain the title's summary? Surely D3 is the D3-based library
for building custom charts and graphs?

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sanderjd
I looked into using D3 for making typical x-y line and bar charts and found
that it required _significantly_ more custom work than HighCharts. My take-
away from the experience was that D3 is great for very custom visualizations,
but if you want to do something simpler, it is worth looking for libraries
that do only that simpler thing well.

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conradfr
I'm currently implementing charts using Flot with AngularJS data-binding and
directives.

I had to find a workaround to the fact that Flot requires fixed width. xCharts
does not suffers this limitation but I will have to evaluate d3.js first.

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beefsack
D3.js as an Angular directive is a thing of beauty, once you get your D3.js
graphics updating live from your Angular data you can do some very nice
dynamic graphics with very little code, whether it be graphs or otherwise.

Brian Ford gives a nice example in his blog and on GitHub:
<http://briantford.com/blog/angular-d3.html>
<https://github.com/btford/angular-d3-demo>

~~~
conradfr
Thanks for the feedback and links, will look into it now.

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Hirvesh
via Functionn - Open Source Resources For Web Developers & Designers:
[http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/12/xcharts-d3-based-
libra...](http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/12/xcharts-d3-based-library-for-
building.html)

P.S. Functionn contains a whole lot more of awesome resources like xCharts.
There only a fraction of them I can post here at a time. Take a look if you're
interested, and subscribe:

<http://functionn.blogspot.com>

~~~
testing12341234
daeken mentioned this yesterday, but you're still spamming the same exact text
with only the name of the library changed.

~~~
Hirvesh
will take care not to do so from now on :)

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joey_muller
D3 seems to be gaining strength here. Sure, it doesn't work perfectly in all
browsers and requires a bit of customization effort to make the charts look
really good. But for me, it is a joy to interact with a chart and show
different views without fetching server data each time. Data lives in the DOM
-- this is a powerful thing.

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andrewingram
I don't like that all the examples (in the examples page) are animated. Loads
of graphing libraries do that in their examples, and it's massively off-
putting. My view is that charts shouldn't be animated unless the animation
reveals something that a static chart couldn't.

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polskibus
Interesting library, however I can see a lot of js and svg parsing errors in
IE9 console. Some examples from <http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts/examples/>
don't show on IE9 at all.

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chucknelson
I was hoping this would also include a simple CSV or other delimited text
import method, but I guess you have to construct the JSON yourself? Is it
omitted because D3 already takes care of this in some other way?

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mnutt
I have to assume so, as D3 does have things like CSV import:

<https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/CSV>

And I assume that it xCharts omits it because of the wide variety of ways you
may get your data. (XHR CSV, JSON, WebSockets, etc)

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ARussell
Someone already mentioned Rickshaw, but I also know of one other library that
looks similar to this: dc.js (<http://nickqizhu.github.com/dc.js/>)

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watty
Awesome, always love new charting libraries. I'm a big fan of D3 but it's too
early to use in commercial apps (in my industry).

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jtl09
good job, keep it growing Paul.

