>
> For the requirements of charts you are exploring HighCharts library.
> You need to search for other libraries with more clear licence,
> suitable to our project.
Sean had also suggested me to look into the licensing issue, I contacted
the HighCharts team and they assured us that we can use the free
non-commercial license.
Make a comparison of other options before we decide about use for
visualization of
> Bench-marking data.
*TL;DR d3.js is great, but would probably be an overkill for our project.
HighCharts is highly regarded among web developers and it's a rather modern
library with probably the best looking graphs, a detailed and consistent
documentation with API reference, and most importantly - it's very easy to
work with and seamlessly integrates(almost Plug and Play). *
There are lots of Javascript visualization libraries, some of them are
proprietary and we can't use them. I did a bit of research some time back
about the best Javascript visualization libraries, and the best options I
looked upon were *d3.js, HighCharts, and Flot. *There are tons others, *Raphael
and jqPlot* are good mentions too. The jist of what I found are as follows:
- If you want to design a new chart which the world has never seen
before, or a known chart but with lots of customization ( again which the
world has never seen before) use D3.
- If you want to quickly create simple charts like bar, pie, line,
spline polar etc. or even time series based bar, line, area charts etc; use
HighCharts.
This is no way means HighCharts is limited to basic charts. It's demo(
http://www.highcharts.com/demo/) should give a good idea about the range of
charts it provides.
There are a number of factors that work in favor on HighCharts, I would
like to highlight a few:
*Simplicity and Integration: *In HighCharts, *A chart = a JSON string. *A
highchart can be completely expressed as a json object, lets call it config
object. To create different kinds of chart, all you have to do is borrow a
config object from one of the demos and change it according to your needs.
*Consistent API :*This config object is consistent among various charts.
For example, if you want to change your pie chart to a bar chart, all
you'll have to do is: configobj.chart.type='bar';
That's it.
*Ability to set defaults. Yet easily override-able: *If we want to create
a lot of similar looking charts but with different data, Highcharts API has
something called as plotoptions. We can set the default look-n-feel setting
for a particular type (i.e. bar/pie etc.) of chart in its plotoptions. If
we want to change this default look and feel just before creating the chart
or even dynamically - we can do that.
*Documentation, Reviews: *I looked at several discussion threads on
stackOverflow and Reddit, and the general consensus is Highcharts is the
best option to go to if we are not creating very complicated non-standard
visualizations. I also found the HighCharts documentation and API reference
to be the richest among others.
*Pretty Graphs: *Among all the libraries I have seen, HighCharts' graphs
look the best. The color schemes are very easily customizable as well. This
is a sample line chart from HighCharts:
http://www.highcharts.com/demo/line-basic/dark-unica
I am sure other libraries can do the job for us as well, but after
examining a lot of factors, I feel HighCharts should work the best for us.
Thanks
Ankesh
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