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Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

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Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#41

Post by porker »

btbuildem wrote: post #39

Data viz used to be my playground, I feel like I can comment on this with some confidence. It feels like the selling point / value prop here is that it supports multiple FE frameworks, but that's where its strengths end for me. It almost looks like a coding exercise more than a library that people would use - seems a great amount of effort went into boilerplate, configs, packaging, documentation etc, but not as much…

Thanks for the great summary. It's been years since I was in this field so very helpful to hear what's now available.

What would you use to plot (or downsample and plot) data that updates every second or more frequently? E.g. IoT data streaming in?

I used dygraphs (I think) a decade ago and recently found Lightning JS and this comparison [1] to other libraries, but the LightningJS license costs are prohibitive outside of well-to-do project domains. And I don't have data that updates that fast - just don't want it badly sampled or drawn.

1. https://github.com/Arction/javascript-charts-performance-com...

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#42

Post by ngalaiko »

ernaem wrote: post #10
ericand wrote: post #6

I'm a sveltekit user and the default SSR really complicated adding a chart library. Would Unovis work with SSR? Appreciate the Svelte support!

It should work well with SvelteKit out of the box — the compiler won't complain about SRR. However no charts will be rendered in the SSR html build.

why not? it seem to be svg based

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#43

Post by V1ndaar »

whoevercares wrote: post #37

I’ve heard Vega/Vega-lite is years ahead of other options, mostly because its expression power which is deeply rooted from years of research and success in industry (Trifacta/UW). Curious if anyone can share a more through analysis or opinions

I would argue the reason it's powerful is that Vega embraces the Grammar of Graphics as first principles (think ggplot2). It's imo the way to think about graphics, but I may be biased.

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#45

Post by sails »

eatonphil wrote: post #7

The thing I've wanted is a visualization library that also comes with the UI controls for configuring graphs: picking the graph type, picking the fields, picking the labels, picking the aggregation, axis settings, etc. Almost no one is implementing libraries that do this. Everyone just keeps building "low-level" graph libraries that leave application developers to build up (in my case) crappy and inflexible configura…

Cube has a nice set of React based examples, which helped highlight some of the better options along your thinking:

Dashboard - https://highcharts-demo.cube.dev/#/

Pivot - https://react-pivot-table-demo.cube.dev/#/

Query builder - https://react-dashboard-demo.cube.dev/#/explore

I personally would avoid BI in the stricter definition (Superset, PowerBI, Metabase etc) unless you are building internal tools, as they have significant baggage catering for their designed use case.

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#46

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

krebby wrote: post #31
go_prodev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, same here. I'd love an open source Power BI alternative.

Check out Apache Superset: https://superset.apache.org/ Originally from Airbnb. Very powerful and flexible OS frontend BI tool

a) Apache Superset is neither powerful nor flexible. It has the absolute minimum functionality to still be called a "BI tool", but just barely.

b) Sadly, Apache Superset is the only "BI tool" that is both free and open source, so you don't have any choice in the matter anyways.

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#47

Post by baandang »

taeric wrote: post #16
noughtme wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my experience has been that non of these solutions provide enough control granularity, and i keep coming back to d3.js (or other libraries like deck.gl) and building my own UI.

In a similar vein, my experience is that most visualizations that people are commonly making are reaching for what is available in R. https://r-graph-gallery.com/ggplot2-package.html

The biggest difference IMO is that there is no default data representation that 99.99% of people use in javascript like pandas/dataframes/numpy/zoo in python/R.

I would even say javascript has better visualization libraries than GGplot but because there is no javascriptDataframe.plot('line') the visualization libraries end up down their own path because of different data representations.

My experience also is that every visualization library will lack something if you want to do anything beyond the most standard visualizations. Almost by definition it has to be that way.

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#48

Post by baandang »

jeltz wrote: post #32
taeric wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar vein, my experience is that most visualizations that people are commonly making are reaching for what is available in R. https://r-graph-gallery.com/ggplot2-package.html

In my case that is 100% true. What I actually want is R but for the web. All the JS libraries are either too simple and rigid or too low level like d3.

You can't have it both ways. You can't have a completely open data representation and an abstraction at a higher level than d3. What you are calling too low level is basically dealing with the fact the data can be anything.

What we really need is a javascript dataframe that everyone uses by default but that is not going to happen. Javascript culture is practically all about reinventing and trying to improve the wheel so we can optimally go in circles.

I think there is an emergent self interest at the group level to keep things complex and salaries growing on the front end too. The complexity and absurdity is hardly a bug at the individual level if getting paid.

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#49

Post by baandang »

btbuildem wrote: post #39

Data viz used to be my playground, I feel like I can comment on this with some confidence. It feels like the selling point / value prop here is that it supports multiple FE frameworks, but that's where its strengths end for me. It almost looks like a coding exercise more than a library that people would use - seems a great amount of effort went into boilerplate, configs, packaging, documentation etc, but not as much…

We really just need generative prompts and AI to decimate the field of dataviz.

99.999% of anything ever done in D3 is 100% useless visualization. The whole field of dataviz is largely much ado about nothing.

I just can't imagine in the next 10 years we don't see a generative prompt that spits out something with D3 and we can move on to something more useful. The end goal is easily described in natural language. We shouldn't need Oppenheimer as the project manager to make some SVG boxes and lines.

Re: Unovis: Data visualization for React, Angular, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript

#50

Post by btbuildem »

mbo wrote: post #40
btbuildem wrote: post #39

Data viz used to be my playground, I feel like I can comment on this with some confidence. It feels like the selling point / value prop here is that it supports multiple FE frameworks, but that's where its strengths end for me. It almost looks like a coding exercise more than a library that people would use - seems a great amount of effort went into boilerplate, configs, packaging, documentation etc, but not as much…

You've cited D3 but I notice that you haven't mentioned Observable's Plot[0], a Javascript GoG that wraps D3. They're both Mike Bostock libraries, so Plot is the pseudo-"blessed" D3 high-level abstraction layer. [0] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot

I'm not up to speed on the latest -- thanks for linking this, it looks great!

I've shied away from Observable, I didn't quite like the lock-in to their notepad-like env, and all the examples following what to me felt like a backward style. It's great to see they've produced a higher-level complement to d3.

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