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Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

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Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#71

Post by sanderjd »

capkutay wrote: post #61
boomskats wrote: post #45

We paid a lot of cash for Highcharts (Highstock actually) a couple of years ago as an up-front investment for a process manager we were building - an OEM licence. This was about a month's salary, straight after I quit my FT job. The product is now ready to go live almost three years later, and there still isn't a charting library, free or otherwise, that offers us the same functionality that this did back when we lic…

Can you comment on highcharts performance? It looks like highcharts uses SVG under the covers. Canvas based visualizations may fare a little better than SVGs once you're trying to render thousands of data points.

I can. Well, on HighStock, but it's basically the same. With a couple tweaks (not really related to performance but possibly helping), it was incredibly performant except on some versions of IE. It came down to the performance of the javascript engine in the browser, and the bottleneck wasn't SVG but rather various calculations on the data to make it suitable for display. We had many thousands of points (up to a few series of up to 1 year of 15-minute meter data) and were doing aggregation client-side as well.

Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#72

Post by sanderjd »

chaostheory wrote: post #67
dmethvin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour. I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh th…

> Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, Here's what you guys keep ignoring: there's other open source alternatives that are free. I'm not helping develop them beyond giving bug reports.

What you keep ignoring is that highcharts is way better than those alternatives, and that many people really like the simplicity of paying people for great products.

Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#74

Post by seasoup »

capkutay wrote: post #61
boomskats wrote: post #45

We paid a lot of cash for Highcharts (Highstock actually) a couple of years ago as an up-front investment for a process manager we were building - an OEM licence. This was about a month's salary, straight after I quit my FT job. The product is now ready to go live almost three years later, and there still isn't a charting library, free or otherwise, that offers us the same functionality that this did back when we lic…

Can you comment on highcharts performance? It looks like highcharts uses SVG under the covers. Canvas based visualizations may fare a little better than SVGs once you're trying to render thousands of data points.

SVG performance degrades based on the amount of data that you are drawing. If you are rendering basic charts you will never run into any issues, if you are doing scatterplots with thousands of points or some other visualization with lots of separate nodes then you run into performance issues.

Canvas performance is limited by the size of the canvas, the larger the canvas, the more time it takes to redraw it.

SVG lets you tie into the DOM and DOM manipulation methods allowing for simple event interactions. Interactive canvas can be done but is more time consuming and difficult, though there are now canvas charting libraries that provide you with some basic "click" or even "hover" functionality.

Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#75

Post by andreash »

A fascinating thing about Highcharts is that they are located in a supertiny, remote town in Norway called Vik. Only 2900 live there. Highcharts employ 10 people + a few remote workers.

You can read about this tiny remote place on the founder's personal webpage here: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=h...

Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#77

Post by dmethvin »

chaostheory wrote: post #67
dmethvin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour. I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh th…

> Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, Here's what you guys keep ignoring: there's other open source alternatives that are free. I'm not helping develop them beyond giving bug reports.

I'm sure your coding skills are great. Thanks for the downvote.

Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#78

Post by neoyagami »

capkutay wrote: post #61
boomskats wrote: post #45

We paid a lot of cash for Highcharts (Highstock actually) a couple of years ago as an up-front investment for a process manager we were building - an OEM licence. This was about a month's salary, straight after I quit my FT job. The product is now ready to go live almost three years later, and there still isn't a charting library, free or otherwise, that offers us the same functionality that this did back when we lic…

Can you comment on highcharts performance? It looks like highcharts uses SVG under the covers. Canvas based visualizations may fare a little better than SVGs once you're trying to render thousands of data points.

I used highstock to plot thousands of points and it eated lime it was nothing . If you want speed , this is for you

Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#79

Post by TorsteinHonsi »

rtfeldman wrote: post #30
voidr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are building a commercial product and 590$ is too expensive, I feel sorry for you. In western countries you could get at most 2-3 man days for that money, I highly doubt that even the best coder could implement Highcharts in 3 days and provide support for it afterwards. If all you want is one or two simple charts then I agree, it is a waste of money to buy something like Highcharts, but if you really need most…

The pricing policy is more obnoxious than the price itself. $390 (or $590 for "maintenance and support") gets you the ability for one single developer to do any kind of work with it. The next tier is $1,500 (or $2,250 for "maintenance and support") and gets you the ability for up to 5 developers to do any kind of work with it. Having to pick between (A) sneaking around behind your vendor's back to violate their licen…

Of course there are steps between (A) and (B) - you can choose to purchase two or three Single Dev licenses. If you need four Single Dev licenses, you are better off buying the 5 dev package.

Re: Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

#80

Post by chaostheory »

dmethvin wrote: post #77
chaostheory wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, Here's what you guys keep ignoring: there's other open source alternatives that are free. I'm not helping develop them beyond giving bug reports.

I'm sure your coding skills are great. Thanks for the downvote.

I didn't downvote you. I'm not sure you realize this but you can't downvote anyone in the same thread as you - at least I can't.
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