Replace Highcharts with non-commercial alternative

chop-dbhi / cilantro

Official client for Harvest (http://harvest.research.chop.edu)

http://cilantro.harvest.io

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Replace Highcharts with non-commercial alternative #505

Open bruth opened 10 years ago

bruth commented 10 years ago

Highcharts is only free for non-commercial use which limits the potentials users of Cilantro. The requirements are quite small:

types: scatter, line, histogram, time series
plot single point or marker (mean, median)
multiple series per chart (overlay of sample distribution vs. population)
pluses: candlestick/boxplot, error bars, zoomable, dynamic refresh of scale (toggle outliers)

Here is a great list of visualization libraries in general: http://selection.datavisualization.ch. One thought I had was to expose options for declaring visualizations libraries that would be hooked into Cilantro when rendering the chart/visual component of the concept or field.

Here are a few that I reviewed that are pretty minimal for what we need:

flot
jqplot
ChartKick.js - This one is particularly interesting because it normalizes the API across charting libraries currently including Highcharts and Google Charts

bruth commented 10 years ago

Another interesting one is JSXGraph which is more of a drawing library, but has a ton of examples on the wiki.

ryanjohara commented 9 years ago

	scatter	line	bar	time series	single point marker	multiple series	candlestick / boxplot	error bars	zoom	dynamic refresh of scale or ajax support
flot	√	√	√	√	√	√	√ / √	√	√	√
jqplot	√	√	√	√	√	√	√ / maybe	√	√	√
chartkick	no	√	√	√	no	√	no / no	no	no	no
jsxgraph	no	√	√	√	√	√	no / no	no	√	√
chartist-js	√	√	√	√	maybe	√	no / no	no	maybe	maybe
c3js	√	√	√	√	maybe	√	no / no	no	√	√

Highcharts, D3, and Flot round out the top three for most popular among the community on SocialCompare, for what it's worth. This seems to be the general trend on stackoverflow and GitHub, as well. Although a couple of years old, this blog post also compares javascript data visualization libraries.

bruth commented 9 years ago

Another contender although there are virtually no docs: https://github.com/gionkunz/chartist-js

bruth commented 9 years ago

Another: http://c3js.org/

naegelyd commented 9 years ago

@ryanjohara Can you update your table above with rows for c3js and chartist-js? After we have those rows in there I think we can do a final comparison and decide on a path forward for this.

ryanjohara commented 9 years ago

The table above has been updated. I think most of the cells have been filled out accurately, though there were a few cases where it wasn't totally obvious.