

Protovis - A visualization toolkit for JavaScript using SVG. - omarish
http://github.com/mbostock/protovis/

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mattj
I've used protovis for an internal graphing framework. It's absolutely,
positively, 100% the best visualization tool for the web.

The syntax is easy to work with (once you get over the initial learning curve,
which is somewhat steep), and it flies on a modern browser. It's the only
framework out there for visualization development that's flexible enough to do
interesting things with.

I think the only other comparable tool is processing (not processingjs, which
is too slow for non-trivial tasks), although processing is focused on pixel
manipulation whereas protovis is focused on vector drawing.

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rbancroft
Protovis is one of the most interesting pieces of code I have looked at
recently. It really opened my eyes up to the power of javascript and I learned
a lot from it. The code is clean, well documented, and imo brilliant.

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samratjp
I am not even surprised this is cool - Jeff Heer is behind it
<http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/> and he's written some crazy cool frameworks -
Prefuse (Java) and Flare (AS3). I'm setting my gitHub watch on this one :-)

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kidsorrow
you guys might also dig the author's next opensource JS project, polymaps:
<http://polymaps.org>

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alexyim
Anyone know what other similar libraries there are?

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strebler
It depends on what you want to want to do - this library has a wider scope
than others I've seen. The closest I know would be Raphael, which is nice in
that it also supports IE (Canvas): <http://raphaeljs.com/>

If you just want Graphs/Charts, here's a few off the top of my head:

<http://www.deensoft.com/lab/protochart/>

<http://www.liquidx.net/plotkit/>

<http://code.google.com/p/flotr/>

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bfung
for clarification, raphael's IE support is not from HTML 5's canvas tag, but
from SVG's precursor, VML:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Markup_Language>

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olegkikin
Doesn't work in IE6/IE7.

Raphaël does.

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bhiggins
Here's a better site for checking out some demos:
<http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/>

This vis library looks really interesting to me because of its flexibility. My
main concern is that it's based on SVG. I wonder how easily it could be
modified to be canvas based instead. The only reason I say that is because
canvas seems to be getting a lot of attention from browser vendors while SVG
is languishing...

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endtime
ProtoVis has a somewhat modular rendering backend, I believe. So you could
probably rewrite it to run on canvas. That said, why do you think SVG is
languishing? The IE9 demos made quite a big deal of their SVG support and the
other major browsers already have pretty decent support for it.

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bhiggins
Looks like I just haven't been paying attention. Thanks for pointing that out.

