Perspective: Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI

https://perspective.finos.org/

by texodus • 3 years ago

328 71 3 years ago

perspective.finos.org

denysonique• 3 years ago

Seems like another website on the HN frontpage today not working with Firefox.

(my previous comment regarding this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441337#35454074)

paranoidxprod• 3 years ago

The site seems to load fine for me on Windows Firefox. Are you having the same error as the parent to your linked comment?

Edit: I see the other commenter and yes, the "treemap" is broken for me as well. Not something a noticed but you are correct.

nanny• 3 years ago

Only the "treemap" chart is broken for me, everything else seems to work ok (Firefox Developer Edition 111.0b6 64-bit Linux. Enhanced tracking protection turned on).

sporkl• 3 years ago

Seems to work mostly fine for me except for the Treemap visualization.

Firefox 111.0.1 on macOS 12.5.1

sinistersnare• 3 years ago

(I'm a contributor to Perspective)

As a Firefox user I definitely want to see better FF support here!

The first step is to get a good test suite. Currently our tests only run on Chrome. So after we get tests running on Firefox, we can move to better support it.

chandureddyvari• 3 years ago

Working for me on Firefox Mac.

lbrindze• 3 years ago

I'm having issues with it loading in Safari (14.1.2) on OS X, but it seems to be loading fine with Firefox (111.0.1) for me. Its pretty zippy too, and this computer is no spring chicken...

imachine1980_• 3 years ago

relly cool project

VWWHFSfQ• 3 years ago

why are web apps always so janky. no offense to the op's app. This is just universal. Every web app I've ever used feels like crap.

adamc2• 3 years ago

"Every" is too strong, but it's common, I agree. I infer it is very challenging to get things to work across web platforms (browsers and OS versions).

MH15• 3 years ago

Their demos performed fine for me on both desktop and mobile. Not sure what the issue is here, you're allowed to require some baseline performance level for something like this.

wongarsu• 3 years ago

I had no performance problems, but right on the first demo each scrollbar is broken in it's own unique way.

The main area with the sparkgrid has good horizontal and vertical scrollbars, but they are nearly invisible, being dark grey on slightly lighter dark grey, and only visible if you hover in the area they scroll. Also the vertical scroll bar doesn't take you to the very bottom.

Then there's the top right area, which has a normal looking scrollbar (good), but once you scroll it changes the size of the entire right panel (weird), and if you drag it past the point where it has reached the bottom (really easy to do accidentally) it starts spasming uncontrollably. If you instead use the scroll wheel, you can scroll to the bottom, but if you scroll a bit further you are back on the top? None of the other scrollbars has either of those issues.

Then there's the bottom right, where the scrollbar is visible, takes you all the way to the bottom, and neither spasms nor resets, but just to be special in its own way it starts out as a big bar as if there was little content below the fold, but the further you scroll the smaller the bar gets. As you scroll up, it grows again. It's also stuttering a bit while making these size changes.

Another example besides scroll bars is the lack of tool tips on the UI (they do exist on data though!), which makes for a weird toolbar that moves its content all over the place on hover. And I guess you're supposed to guess that check boxes are delete buttons.

This doesn't take away from the app, it's still cool and useful, but little annoyances like that add up to make it feel weird and un-native (I guess foreign is the word).

snacktaster• 3 years ago

It's because web tech itself is crappy and the ecosystem surrounding it is a complete cesspool.

simonw• 3 years ago

What hardware are you testing them on?

I have a recent MacBook Pro and current generation iPhone and they're often indistinguishable from native apps for me - once they've loaded at least.

cfuendev• 3 years ago

Definitively not made for lightweight mobile, tried on two browsers (Harmonic HN Client's Webview and Via Browser) and the website crashed my phone.

deathtrader666• 3 years ago

Worked perfectly fine on Brave on Android.

gorbachev• 3 years ago

I just made a few of our data analysts drool showing them this. Nice work!

xal• 3 years ago

Awesome project.

If there is ever a project that needed an electron app it’s this one. I’d love to have a Perspective.app that efficiently loads local data style files.

ivanmontillam2• 3 years ago

Electron is going to kill the good performance gains of Perspective. Even if you have a fully beefed-up workstation, Electron is going to trigger the CPU fans.

Electron is discouraged nowadays in favor of lightweight solutions like Sciter[0], Tauri[1] or even WebView2[2].

[0] https://sciter.com/

[1] https://tauri.app/

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/

airstrike• 3 years ago

I'm building something similar to this and going down the Tauri route

eis2• 3 years ago

I don't see why rendering this in Electron (which is essentially just a bundled Chromium browser) would perform differently than in a standalone browser. Neither do I see how projects like Tauri or WebView2 which just embed the system webview would give better rendering performance. Microsofts webview is even using the same rendering engine as Electron - Blink. What you'd get is significantly smaller binary size but most people don't care much about that.

texodus4• 3 years ago

We're building something along these lines at https://www.prospective.co/

haolez• 3 years ago

This looks pretty awesome. What's the catch? There has to be something :)

nothrowaways• 3 years ago

Same question:)

egeozcan11• 3 years ago

These aren't accessible at all. Did you try using the components with a screen reader, with just a keyboard and in high contrast modes?

They look amazing but I'm a bit puzzled to why in 2023, a11y would not be a priority.

Even this landing page itself isn't keyboard friendly.

Some patterns to help you get started with ARIA: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/

Designing for a11y: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/

troymc• 3 years ago

It's an open source project. You could create an issue on their GitHub repo, or better yet, create a PR and reference this existing issue:

https://github.com/finos/perspective/issues/2133

egeozcan11• 3 years ago

I just commented about something I found lacking, it's not a hostile comment, and suggested improvements to the authors who seem to be hanging out here. I think if they have interest, they can add these as an issue, or choose not to.

To the downvoters: Do you really think I should open issues for every critic I place to open source projects here and otherwise not mention anything? I also love and contribute to open-source but this feels like too demanding.

supermatt6• 3 years ago

Ironically your website doesn't meet the first criterion of the WAI design tips you linked (the nav links): https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/#provide-sufficient-co...

No doubt I have poor a11y on my own projects - but if you are going to launch into critique of the landing page, at least do it from a position of authority :)

TBH, I am not sure how a charting lib could effectively be accessible to any great extent. Its not covered in the resources you linked, and in my experience with other charting libs this seems to be commonplace. I would be interested if you have any insights or suggestions on that, as I use charts extensively on one of my projects.

egeozcan11• 3 years ago

If we are going to go this way: You previously commented that something doesn't work on Firefox, do all your project superior browser support? That doesn't make sense does it? What does my website which I updated 6 years ago (and created more than a decade ago) have anything to do with the validity of my comment? It just has a contrast issue (let me fix that BTW [edit: done]), a criteria that was set way later than I built that site. Also this is a component library aimed at businesses, not a personal website that I'm commenting about. Please stop trying to poison the well (going as far as hunting a11y issues on my personal site) and argue on merits.

I do it from a position of support, which I had the chance of developing by observing the users of the apps I created, and I made a giant software suit (more than 1000 views) pass an accessibility audit in my current company.

This is not just a charting library, see the examples down the page. Also, see: https://www.highcharts.com/blog/tutorials/best-chart-accessi...

dsmmcken• 3 years ago

Menu aside, what is a a screen reader supposed to do with a table changing at 100 msg/s?

tomjakubowski• 3 years ago

auctioneer voice plugin

egeozcan11• 3 years ago

What are your eyes going to do with such a table? People pause right? So it would be nice to have some help to navigate. aria-sort in that example would help a lot, also some menus usable with a keyboard, and not disabling outlines.

texodus4• 3 years ago

Not sure what specifically you are looking at - the data grid element e.g. is a well-formed, native HTML `<table>`, as recommended by the w3 [1] and renders fine AFAICT with the screen readers in Safari and Chrome (the browsers I have installed).

A specific report on the GitHub for issues you find would be much appreciated!

[1](https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/table/examples/tabl...)

egeozcan11• 3 years ago

I was looking at the datagrid. I can't use the menus with the keyboard. I can't select columns. I can't see the currently focused element. My screen reader does not inform me of the menus, nor can I interact with them. Inputs have outline: none. Labels are not connected to the inputs.

In this example: https://perspective.finos.org/block/?example=superstore

I can't use the tree with the keyboard. From the patterns page I linked, you can see an implementation example for an accessible tree element.

I mean, I can continue. I'm not saying this to devalue your work, and I wish I had the time to go in depth and analyze all the components and give you more feedback, but I don't. So I humbly suggest you do a bit research about the topic and improve the product some.

Perhaps my original comment sounded too dismissive and therefore got many negative feedback, but I'm sincerely concerned. I wanted to hint at this as this is a tool that may be used by businesses and some people cannot do their job because of inaccessible tooling.

I do like what you are doing and the components do look cool - nothing to take away from that. Please take my comment as constructive as you can take it to be because I was trying to go for that, and perhaps my frustration in the last few years with this topic made me also whine a little bit :)

andrewcamel• 3 years ago

Big fan of this... suspect a lot of the modern SaaS BI / analytics players would benefit. Just end up hitting limits trying to use Javascript to render large datasets, having tried to build some of this myself. Happy to share some potential use cases / thoughts on where you could apply this if helpful! Feel free to reach out.

intelVISA• 3 years ago

Also interested in disrupting this space, do you have a preferred contact method?

andybak2• 3 years ago

What the hell is BI?

johnzim• 3 years ago

Business Intelligence

CyberDildonics4• 3 years ago

What does that mean or imply?

mock-possum• 3 years ago

I know right? Hilariously bad title, especially considering the I/l ambiguity - a Boys Love novel? Bi-sexual computing? Bachine Learning?

Obviously jargon is a thing, we all deal with it, but when you put something up like this to a more general audience, you’ve got to give some thought to presentation, otherwise you end up with apparent word salad.

andybak2• 3 years ago

Yep. I actually guessed it was Business Intelligence before I posted but I play dumb on things like this as a matter of principle.

We shouldn't have to guess.

szundi• 3 years ago

We reinvent the wheel again. But new tech. Perfect.

nextworddev• 3 years ago

Given how powerful Apache Arrow is, there's a lot of promise to this library.

infinite8s• 3 years ago

Nice texodus! What's new since you spun it out into prospective? I worked on perspective a long time ago when it was still proprietary ;)

lerela• 3 years ago

On my end examples do not work (empty placeholders) with Firefox (on Linux). They work well with Chrome though.

epups• 3 years ago

This is excellent. Snappy and pretty, two qualities that often elude BI apps.

Perspective: Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI

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