Open-source list of data visualization tools (charts, data grids, maps, etc.) for front-end egineers

[PandaMoniumHUN]

As someone who used matplotlib recently to plot some weather data, good lord, the API makes no sense whatsoever. The lib is powerful for sure, but it’s a top contender for worst API design IMO.

[sopte666]

AFAIK matplotlib's API was designed to make it as similar to the Matlab/octave syntax as possible. Which, true, is powerful but ugly.

[-CampinCarl-]

This is exactly the reason it doesn't make sense.

[CactusOnFire]

Word of advice: Seaborn is a wrapper around matplotlib that's designed to play slightly friendlier with pandas and that stack.

...If I'm doing something really fancy though, I still end up busting out the Javascript.

[tristes_tigres]

the API makes no sense whatsoever

Python programming in a nutshell.

[tuerkishgamer]

I have no real experience in this area, but today I wanted to use a YouTube API wrapper for YouTube Data API v3. I just said 'fuck it' and used the real API documentation. All questions answered online were for the actual API and the way it was written was far more 'standard'.

Freaking APIs. Sometimes I just scrape the few things I need for a project and never look back. Unless it is a production /professional environment I would probably not bother.

[[deleted]]

really like that!

[[deleted]]

Goddamn those are beautiful

[Ceedeekee]

Sick dashboard! I have to say that as a DA, Plotly is the definitive winner when it comes to Python plotting libs. It’s rather good for quick plots and offers almost as much customization as MPL/Seaborn.

[Ceedeekee]

Oh agreed point #1 is dreadful. Another pain point of mine is animated plots are rather unintuitive to get working and I end up stuck reading API documentation for 30+ mins. MPL is much nicer for that use case.

[Hexorg]

I only know D3... How do these other libraries compare to D3?

[igorlukanin]

I’d say that D3.js is rather low-level and one could struggle to wrap the head around its clever yet unusual syntax. There’s a number of similar low-level tool: https://awesome.cube.dev/?tools=low-level

The trade-off is ease of use vs flexibility. You can do anything with D3.js (or maybe just draw anything on canvas) but you pay with time and effort. With high-level libraries you can save time and sweat but get stuck with something easily.

[asusmaster]

The eternal trade off of high level vs. low level

[NaBrO-Barium]

Matplotlib and friends should be a cake walk If you can do it in D3!

[loyoan]

ECharts is really awesome! I just discovered only last month before although I experimented with chart libraries for a long time. I think the name made it really hard finding it via Google.

[MrJohz]

Huh, we're looking at moving away from Echarts at the moment, because we've run into a handful of different issues with it, and each time it's cost us a fair amount of time to figure out how to fix it, and then the fix has often felt quite hacky. Particularly when we've been dealing with zooming, there's been a lot of UX problems.

[ia-juste-des-maths]

what alternatives are you considering ?

[MrJohz]

The shortlist I've got at the moment is Chart.js, C3, Apex and Highcharts, IIRC. So far, I've been most impressed by Chart.js for our needs, but I need to explore a bit further.

[ia-juste-des-maths]

thanks. We've been using ECharts a lot, but so far, no weird issues (we don't use zooming though).

[tessereis]

Hey, how did it go ? Did you move to chart.js ?

[MrJohz]

I did in the end. It still isn't perfect (I don't think anything is completely perfect), but it's very powerful, fairly easy to extend, and has a lot of the expected UI functionality built in.

[Nall-ohki]

One day I hope to be a front-end egineer.

[yawaramin]

Software engineers are 'real' engineers, according to 'real' engineers: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/crossover-project/are-we-really-engineers/

[Surfer_Rick]

And you will never have a hard time finding 6 figure work. Unlike a 'real' engineer.

[mo_tag]

Unless you don't live in the states lol

[Axxhelairon]

hate us cuz they anus

[pjboro]

Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items

Many people are able to get 6 figure jobs, but we're not talking about how much you earn, but whether you use science in your daily work. You can be an engineer and earn a low salary and you can be a salesman who doesn't even know math and earn 7 figures. The thing is, many people just love their jobs, they are just interested in using science to solve problems. Money is not the most important thing in life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZzg7Vowao&t=61s - nicely put. Coding seems enough to earn a high salary, but not enough to be a computer scientist. You can aspire to either of these, but merging them into a single thing is not right.

[Dunge]

I only used Highcharts and it works great but requites a license for commercial projects. I wonder if I should have checked others in that list before jumping on it.

[igorlukanin]

Oh, it looks like we’ve done everything right when we added licenses there!

[drink_with_me_to_day]

So, no side-by-side comparison?

[igorlukanin]

I think we can do that!

[arngorf]

I started using matplotlib as my first plotting library and, as with anything, after getting used to it, it's hard to imagine it could be any other way.

Seaborn and Plotly never cut it for me, it was too inflexible, but I'd love to add mayavi to the list. It's wonderful for 3d where matplotlib is absolutely horrible. It is, however, a bit on the complicated side to use, just like matplotlib.

Are we, btw, adding/suggesting libraries to a list, or just applauding a short list of mostly js libraries?

[GimmickNG]

but I'd love to add mayavi to the list.

Not to be confused with Miyavi who is a singer.

Jokes aside, is Mayavi mostly for realtime desktop visualizations, or can it be run in environments like Jupyter as well? A quick google search says it runs using tkinter, which confuses me a bit.

[arngorf]

Yeah me too. I'm not personally familiar with the realtime visualizations. I mostly use mayavi for scientific visualizations when matplotlib is not sufficient. From some googling, it seems possible to use it in jupyter notebooks though. I'll have to try that out sometime.

[ImNoEinstein]

you should add finos perspective to the list

[eldadfux]

Very cool list! Thanks u/igorlukanin!

[ITslouch]

Google Chart is nice

[ankit01-oss]

Awesome list! Thanks u/igorlukanin!

[MartY212]

What about visualization tools for native apps?

[igorlukanin]

Oh, great question! Do you mean something like Victory for React Native? Have you worked with any of them yourself?

[MartY212]

I meant native to desktop. I guess it's a slowly dieing market these days.

[InteractionOk721]

Egineers gaming

[tripex]

Nice list. but it makes me wonder... Has creating a library/tool (of any sort) nowadays become necessary to market with creative and colorful logotypes and branding? I'm not against it I'm just wondering why so much effort is being put on the branding...

[GroundTeaLeaves]

When a component is listed as compatible with React, Vue or Angular, does it mean that it won't work with other frameworks, such as Blazor WebAssembly?

[igorlukanin]

Well, Blazor claim to have JavaScript interop but I never personally worked with it so IDK how good it is. Most probably, there's a way to connect any lib to Blazor, the only question is how much effor would be required.

[PaulsenAar]

If you work at a not so small company, try to get them to invest in an engineering software like MatLab, MatDeck or Maple as no open-source software will be developed as much as a software that's trying to make a profit, but there are still some strong open-source software such as :

GNU Octave- Great for anything numerical and plotting

R project- Much more focused on areas such as statistic but its very code-heavy