CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visualizationdata-visualization
Marques
Marques

Reputation: 27

Online graphing and data visualization frameworks

I have been looking around at web applications and websites with rich graphs, charts, and data visualization and for the most part have been able to determine which frameworks or tools websites are using. However I was looking over 'resumup.com' and couldn't determine what they are using. Does anyone know off hand or can you tell? It doesn't seem like any javascript framework i've seen unless its custom...is it some sort of flash or flex framework? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Marques

Upvotes: 0

Views: 540

Answers (1)

Connor Gramazio
Connor Gramazio

Reputation: 1022

I apologize in advance for not being able to hyperlink everything. StackOverflow is placing a limit on the number of link I can put here. Had to shrink 9 links down to 2.

I'm not too familiar with ResumUP, so I can't speak directly to that. Though, since it is on Facebook, my guess is that it is almost certainly uses homebrewed, javascript-based visualization code.

Speaking more broadly to the web as a whole, and to the first part of your post, D3 is becoming the most popular option for web-based visualizations (particularly those that are interactive). An example of D3 that you've might have seen is The New York Times' 2013 budget visualization (and most other interactive visualizations on the NYT, for that matter). However D3 is capable of more than just making visualizations. Compare The New York Times example to Visual.ly's Inequality In America site, which is also made using D3.

For more basic visualizations like bar charts, many companies offer APIs for creating visualizations, like Google's Chart Tools. And even more don't use any toolkit. Take for instance the popular wind visualization tool by Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg. This website showing visualizations for the civil war only depends on jQuery for javascript code (and on the Google Maps API).

Other frameworks include, but are not limited to, Protovis (I'd use D3 instead), processing.js, and countless others.

I'm not sure if you have any plans on making web-based visualization tools, but if you do, I'd highly recommend using D3. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it gets you thinking about visualizations in terms of data, which can only help improve the quality of what you end up making. As an added benefit, D3 is one of the better toolkits in terms of how it treats the creation of visualizations. How you create and combine visual primitives in D3 is fairly natural. Not perfect, but definitely better than most alternatives.

Finally, on top of visualizations, the internet is abound with infographics (see Visual.ly's blog for examples). While these can theoretically be made with frameworks like D3, they are more likely than not made with Adobe Illustrator, saved as images, and then uploaded.

Upvotes: 2

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