
TauCharts: Data-focused JavaScript charting library - infinite8s
http://blog.taucharts.com/taucharts-data-focused-charting-library/
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honzzz
At the [http://taucharts.com](http://taucharts.com) it says "Free open source
D3.js-based library" but in the tutorial at
[http://api.taucharts.com/tutorials/5min.html](http://api.taucharts.com/tutorials/5min.html)
it says "free for non-commercial use". At GitHub it is sporting Apache
License, Version 2.0 which - if I am not mistaken - allows commercial use.
Could you please clear that up for me? Am I allowed to use it in commercial
products (like a website made for one of my clients) or not? Thanks.

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tablet
It is free for commercial use, the site will be fixed, it is a mistake in the
5min page.

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honzzz
Great, I see that you already fixed it, thank you - I can add "provider
solving problems quickly" to my personal list of reasons to use the app.

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awjr
I still find charting tools that do not allow interaction with the a group of
charts to enable further filtering very lacking. The gold standard I evaluate
any charting library against is [http://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/](http://dc-
js.github.io/dc.js/)

My reasoning is that most dashboards should be designed to enable data to tell
a story and enable users to interact and create their own story.

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taucharts
As a taucharts developer, I would give you a "best comment" award :) Actually
taucharts is moving to this direction. We want to simplify API for dashboards
and composite charts to allow users create "visual stories". Stay tuned :)

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awjr
I think the reason dc.js works so well is that it is tightly coupled to
crossfilter
([http://square.github.io/crossfilter/](http://square.github.io/crossfilter/)).
This manages the multi-dimensional views that dc.js leverages to render
charts.

When developing, the chart bit is usually the easiest bit to implement.
Getting the data set into the views you need is where you spend a lot of time.

Good luck with the chart engine!

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anc84
Please don't use the combination of red and green as early option for category
colors. Many people have color vision problems and that combinations is very
problematic for them.

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taucharts
Thanks for notice, we will think about that. Actually chart API allows to
configure color brewer and I hope we will have several themes soon.

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__float
This is a rather minor nitpick, but I think the documentation and TauCharts
website as a whole could use some editing by a native English speaker.

That said, the content and goals for the project really are quite cool! I'm
looking forward to where TauCharts can go in the future.

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pc86
If your goal is to express ideas and get someone to
contribute/download/convert, I don't think that's a minor nitpick at all. It
was pretty painful to read certain parts.

~~~
taucharts
As well documentation for taucharts is open sourced:
[https://github.com/TargetProcess/taucharts-
docs](https://github.com/TargetProcess/taucharts-docs). You can help a
project.. just send pull requests with corrected grammar.

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baldeagle
What makes it better than Vega? I like how straight forward it is, much like
highcharts. I'll explore it more tomorrow.

~~~
taucharts
Actually I personally like the concept of Vega but in my humble opinion the
protocol is too academic, implementation goes too slowly so I doubt that Vega
suits for real world application.

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jpatel3
It seems interesting for learning purpose.

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etpinard
So, if I get this right, being 'data-friendly' sums up to using data in the
form [ {val1: 1, val2: 2}, {val1: 2, val2: 3}] and then mapping x: 'val1', y:
'val2' instead of something like {x: [1,2], y: [2,3]}. The former assumes that
the input data comes in a csv or a similar format. This makes charting
computed data (à la MATLAB or numpy/matplotlib) rather awkward.

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taucharts
You've got it right. Also I have an idea to make an API that joins data
processing and plotting like tauCharts.data(#).aggregate(#).plot(#)

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hliyan
I like this. A 20 second glance at the JavaScript in the first example was all
it took for me understand how this works.

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caractacus
What I want with such charting solutions is something to export or copy and
paste data from excel and put it into a chart. Just that. No need to manually
edit a javascript file or html code beyond customising the appearance once the
data is in there. Is this available somewhere?

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revorad
[https://plot.ly/](https://plot.ly/)

~~~
acomjean
Some of our biologists use plot.ly. They seem to like it.

Those that know it still are using ggplot2 and R. This grammar of graphics
plotting library really seems to gold standard of plotting.

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honzzz
My first impression could not be better - it seems to be simple to use and it
looks good. BTW, when you click on the Facebook button at the bottom of the
page, the sharing box is under that disqus box - you might want to fiddle with
z-index or something.

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taucharts
Thanks for positive feedback. FB button is already fixed

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infinite8s
I wonder how this compares to VarianceCharts -
[https://variancecharts.com/](https://variancecharts.com/) (besides the
license). They both claim to get inspiration from the grammar of graphics.

~~~
taucharts
As far as I understand from quick review the projects are quite similar. But
variancecharts don't have facets and not free for commercial use. Difference
in API doesn't matter. Taucharts can be wrapped to webcomponent and described
on the page using tag as well.

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hughes
What's most astonishing about all this is that the AMC Rebel gets 0mpg!

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taucharts
I'm happy you noticed that :) Obviously this is a corrupted row in a data so
you can try "exclude" feature of tooltip plugin to remove this record from the
chart in one click

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alexro
Any plans for spider chart? Geo charts?

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tablet
Basic Geo charts are already there, but not documented so far.

In future we are going to support all type of visualizations from Grammar of
Graphic, so it includes spider chart as well. In fact it is Polar Parallel
chart and it will be possible to create it when support of polar coordinates
will be added.

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hadley
Given that you called them facets, I'm going to assume you're familiar with
ggplot2. In retrospect, I thinking adding non-Cartesian coordinate systems was
a mistake. They are a huge amount of work and only make a handful of charts
easier (and most of which, like the radar chart, are not that useful).

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jpatel3
how much data you can visualize with TauCharts? And on the first glance
couldn't see how many different types of chart you can make.

~~~
taucharts
Friendly speaking, we didn't make a performance or optimization research yet.
I can only share an experience we've got from using taucharts in our main
product - "Targetprocess". So we setup a limit to 1000 rows (+/-50%) which
seems to be acceptable performance / usefulness balance to draw a chart within
a 0.5 seconds. Also it depends on chart type. Drawing huge facet with more
than 100 cells in it can be painful while plain scatter plot on the same data
works fine.

