Deciding on the javascript library

[drecodeam]

Seeing the browser Support of SVG, I think we are good to go with D3.js as of now. If any issue arises after testing it in mobile, we might switch to fallback Raphael.

It's not gonna be supported in IE 8

[drecodeam]

@flyankur do you understand this project : https://github.com/wrobstory/vincent and this http://trifacta.github.io/vega/ to go along with it. It looks pretty cool to me.

• read this to understand what is vega and why is it cool - https://github.com/trifacta/vega/wiki/Vega-and-D3. Its built from the same guys who built protovis library that then got promoted to D3

[flyankur]

Looks great. First look at example - it seems easy & apt.

[drecodeam]

@flyankur ya but going ahead with vincent means making the stuff in the backend and not the frontend. This gives us one flexibility of rendering png's directly, really easing it out for us on the mobile side as we just need to render the images. No responsive issues, no interactivity, plain and simple images... Makes it easier.

But on the second hand, it makes us really difficult to add interactivity to something that has not been generated on the frontend.

[drecodeam]

on how to use vega : https://github.com/trifacta/vega/wiki/Runtime

[drecodeam]

Gotta go with this. So after going through a lot of stuff online, here is the final kamehaha :

• Can't use D3 directly - it's a low level language for interacting with SVG, no direct support for charts and graphs, steep learning curve, and difficult fallback options.
• For small projects like this, and I say small as there is not going to be much non-standard custom visualization, usually a library built upon D3 is being used.
• Going ahead with Vega
  • It's a standard grammer - makes it highly resuable
  • Standard grammer means that all we need to reuse it is to make interpreters, that is a python interpreter like vincent and something similar on the front end.
  • Gives us ability to cache( or store ) just the vega grammer for different visualizations. Then reuse the grammer to recreate the graphics on mobile( native in future ), web, and server side. Hence gives us many options like using multiple libraries, raphael for IE 6-8, something else for mobile, and different library for say visualizing a new kind of inforgraphic. All we would have to do is pass on to that library the vega grammer.
  • Vincent allows us to recreate png hence making the graph easily embeddable, shareable on social networking sites, renderable on old mobile phone browsers etc
• I just want to try this vega thing, looks kinda cool, and can also build something out of it, like a new project or something

[pragunbhutani]

I like how you can just switch between SVG and PNG renderers. Also, it makes a reference to Pulp Fiction. +1

[flyankur]

https://github.com/adobe-webplatform/Snap.svg & http://snapsvg.io/ definitely changes things :)