Flotr2 : a library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs

by gourneau • 14 years ago

315 59 14 years ago

ChrisClark• 14 years ago

Neat, I used Flotr for a personal project a long time ago and really liked it. The author also helped me with a problem and implemented a feature I needed. I'll keep this around for any future uses.

gourneau• 14 years ago

Version 2 has a lot of great new features. The went in search of this because I need to draw a client side chart with 300,000 points on a scatter plot, and I wanted to see if canvas could do it. Turns out it can. At least with Chrome http://jsfiddle.net/vN4C3/

kordless2• 14 years ago

The docs don't say much about stacking area charts, and when you add lines : { fill : true } to a line chart it seems to overlap the areas. Anyone know how to do it?

jurre• 14 years ago

In normal flot theres a stacking add-on and you can add {stack: true} to your chart. Not sure if this works the same but I'd guess it's similar.

BiWinning2• 14 years ago

Benefits over Highcharts?

kordless2• 14 years ago

It's free.

BiWinning2• 14 years ago

Do you have a paid subscription to Highcharts?

zmmmmm2• 14 years ago

Beautiful, only complaint is it's 100kb minified - that's a lot of JS. Would love to know if there is any kind of modularization (if I only need 1 kind of chart can I lose some of the weight?).

wamatt• 14 years ago

Purdy! But yah that's a lot of bloat for eyecandy.

machrider• 14 years ago

Realistically, a few static PNGs would exceed 100KB in a lot of cases. Any image-heavy page is going to have a few hundred KB of data. I wouldn't hold it against them.

simonsarris• 14 years ago

Oh dear. 100kb is bad for this sort of thing? Does anyone know if that's a commonly held view?

I've been working on a Canvas library for full-powered diagramming for a year and a half and it currently weighs in at 597kb minified. (private alpha going on right now, so its nearing final size)

It's super awesome and covers an enormous amount of enterprise diagramming needs like customizable nodes, links, layouts, an undo manager, data binding, models, overviews, events, commands, tools, you get the idea.

But do you think people will reject it based on the size? Do you think not having a slimmer version would be a deal breaker?

gringomorcego• 14 years ago

Well it only matters if it's going to get loaded a bazillion times. I mean, if you're focusing on something that's really good at a small domain, than I don't think you have anything to worry about. People keep optimizing crazily based on the assumption that it's going to be everywhere, which seems to be a bit overly optimistic.

zmmmmm2• 14 years ago

> Oh dear. 100kb is bad for this sort of thing? Does anyone know if that's a commonly held view?

Not at all. For what you are actually getting 100kb is awesome. However I like to develop really light pages especially for mobile. It's not even all about download size, mobile browsers can bog down even just parsing and keeping JS in memory.

heyitsnick• 14 years ago

Just the core of Google Charts if 150kb. 100kb seems light to me and certainly not a deal breaker. But grandparent question is still a good one, is it possible to slim it down if you just use one chart? Probably a common usage is just to have one or two graphs of the same type on a site.

vidar• 14 years ago

Any chance for getting into the alpha?

altrego99• 14 years ago

This reduces to less than 30kb zipped. Time has come when browsers start supporting zipped javascript files, I guess.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

When did gzipped responses stop being accepted?

rorrr• 14 years ago

It's 31KB gzipped. This is nothing.

cesutherland6• 14 years ago

Maintainer here. It is ~30kb gzipped, and is modular but there is no modular build yet. Individual plugins and chart types are not required, which cuts out a lot of the size.

The 100kb minified unzipped is a concern of mine, however. As the library evolves, keeping it trim and trimmer is a goal.

wtracy• 14 years ago

How does it stack up against Google Charts?

TwistedWeasel3• 14 years ago

Last I looked most of the cooler Google charts were Flash based, which was a problem for me at the time as I was looking for something that works on iPad.

From what I can tell this is one of the better HTML5 chart libraries i've seen but in general these days I like to build stuff with d3 instead.

dudus2• 14 years ago

The only chart that was flash based were the map charts. They were redone and now it's svg. https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery...

dudus2• 14 years ago

Some time ago I used both Flot and Google Charts to build a dashboard. Each of them have it's own strengths. I believe that flotr2 is not so different than flot to what I've seen.

By the time I was woking on this project Google Charts was fragmented into 2 different libraries, Google Image charts and Google Visualization API.

My project was to draw a dashboard with multiple charts and connect them to data sources that collected the charts data on the backend. So every time you loaded the dashboard it fired multiple AJAX calls one for each chart's data.

Flot was very easy to work with, the interface to load data is simple and makes sense. It offered good options to customize charts. It offered Mixed charts where you could have lines and bars on the same chart. That was the only reason I brought flot to the mix, there was no way to draw charts using bars and lines on Google Charts back then.

Google Charts on the other hand was a little bit harder to work with. The interface to input data is less obvious and has some strange decisions. Important to notice that Google Charts also defines a protocol to load data into charts, the protocol was called "wire protocol" back then but was renamed to "Chart Tools Datasource Protocol"[1] currently on version 0.6. Sometimes the chart design was inconsistent and that was apparent when you had a bunch of different chart types on the same page. The Geo charts also had a weird behavior, different from most other charts, possibly because they were rendered using flash. The protocol Google establishes for chart data is hard to get started but once you integrate with it is very easy to change the visualization and creates good structure.

Google Charts got a big update a couple weeks ago, the previous version are being deprecated and all charts are now rendered using HTML5 techniques, most of the time SVG. The protocol also got a big update and fixed a lot of bugs that made my life somewhat miserable weeks ago. Now it also supports mixed charts (bars and lines), so I don't need flot anymore.

I'm in the process of creating another dashboard now, and I've been using Google Charts only this time.

My advice is that if you're planning to draw only a couple of charts and flotr2 does the work go with it. It's easier to work with and lighter.

If you're building something that depends on charts a lot go with Google Charts. The protocol will come handy and it has some helpers to connect to backend data sources and Google Spreadsheets built-in.

If you need to create a product that relies on the charting library too much you probably want to support more than one charting library and possibly have the option to switch the library on the fly. The deprecation of the previous Charting library. The deprecation policy for Google Charts may be a little frightening[2].

[1] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/dev/imp... [2] https://developers.google.com/chart/terms

amatix• 14 years ago

Interestingly, the Google Image Charts API is deprecated as of April... https://developers.google.com/chart/image/ - they're only focusing on the HTML5/SVG version.

mey2• 14 years ago

Is this suitable for realtime streams of data?

Looking for something easier to work with then d3.js/cubism.js.

TwistedWeasel3• 14 years ago

I'm working on something like that but it's very far from ready. I'm interested in any feedback...

http://frasergraham.github.com/live_stats.js/

liamk• 14 years ago

Can it also be used with socket.io? I'm working on a real-time app and I'm using socket.io to transport the data and graphing it on canvas. I'd be happy to use a graphing library that 1) looks good, and 2) works with real-time data, instead of my custom solution.

karmi• 14 years ago

Cubism is pretty easy to work with, or? See my heavily annotated sketch of continuous polling with Cubism; http://bl.ocks.org/2689616

mey2• 14 years ago

Could be me, could be the docs, but I was having trouble groking how to wire up non-graphite/node.js connection.

cesutherland6• 14 years ago

d3 and cubism are great.

I have written another library, envision.js, which is more suitable for realtime data. Here's an example: http://humblesoftware.com/envision/demos/realtime. Envision here is adapted to Flotr2, but working with it is higher level than working with Flotr2 directly.

Swizec• 14 years ago

It seems I always stumble upon these awesome graphing libraries right before I'm supposed to post an interesting dataset somewhere.

This invariably results in complicating my life far beyond what is reasonable and never managing to publish the dataset/graphs because it's too fun figuring out how everything works.

RBerenguel• 14 years ago

Stick to something (like d3js,) it's what I've decided to do.

mukaiji• 14 years ago

This is awesome!

I wasn't a big fan of color scheme initially (very powerpointy mind-you) but I looked at the source and saw the colors can be changed. Great work!!!

xxiao• 14 years ago

does it have anything to do with flot which is a jquery charting plugin?

degobah• 14 years ago

I looked into this, and apparently flotr2 is forked from flotr. flotr was "inspired by" flot, but uses Prototype instead of jQuery. Note that flotr2 removed the Prototype dependency so:

    flot:   the original       uses jQuery
    flotr:  inspired by flot   uses Prototype
    flotr2: branch of flotr    no dependency

Zaheer• 14 years ago

Awesome! I used Flotr for a personal project a while back.

Made a simple page with graph of common O-notations: https://students.ics.uci.edu/~zmohiudd/ONotationVisualizer.h...

ylem• 14 years ago

I used to use the original flot, but lately, we've been playing with jqplot. How do you feel this compares? I like the plug-in system in jqplot and recently we added 2D plots (heatmaps) in our local version.

ravejk• 14 years ago

Benefits over dygraphs? http://dygraphs.com/

gridspy2• 14 years ago

Wow! Looks great for Gridspy ( see http://your.gridspy.co.nz/demo/ )

We need to visualise power usage data in the browser. The more tools we have the better. We're currently using dygraph but this looks much more flexible. I hope that the browser support is good.

cesutherland6• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. Please check out another project of mine, Envision.js: http://humblesoftware.com/envision/

Envision is a visualization toolkit for fast composite, interactive and animated visualizations. It's adapted to work with Flotr2.

Flotr2 & envision support Android, iOS and new Blackberries, any modern browser with Canvas, and IE7+ with FlashCanvas / excanvas. I've seen it in IE6 too, but I do not test that browser.

kberg• 14 years ago

Gridspy, what do you need that Dygraphs doesn't provide?

gridspy2• 14 years ago

Bar Graphs. Animations. Performance while adding data live. A streamlined API.

mbell• 14 years ago

Well done, will likely use.

My only criticism right now is that your demo site breaks back button functionality (click on a chart on the landing page and then hit back to see what I mean).

cesutherland6• 14 years ago

Demos definitely need work!

Edit: back button should be ok now.

cpsaltis• 14 years ago

I had problems with these too, better check them again

barfoomoo• 14 years ago

Is there any charting library which supports fetching data from server as the chart is horizontally scrolled? I want to chart some historical data that spans over years.

dgabriel• 14 years ago

A quick look at the documentation seems to indicate you could build that in.

cesutherland6• 14 years ago

My other project envision.js handles this nicely. You can check out one example here: http://humblesoftware.com/envision/demos/ajax

The library is still young, and that functionality you see there will mature a bit yet.

kfk• 14 years ago

I can't test this on IE<9 right now, but comparing to flot it seems they added the option to put axis labels, which I think is a big deal. In flot you can do it, but you need a plugin.

Now if they add also a 3rd parameter to points (x,y and identifier) it will be amazing.

code4pay• 14 years ago

I'm currently working on a project to combine it with pivot.js. should make it a pretty good js only reporting solution

kyberias• 14 years ago

This page is a prime example of how one can break the browser's history (back-button). (Chrome)

cesutherland6• 14 years ago

Added back button support. Wasn't a bug, just was never implemented.

petepete• 14 years ago

I'm currently using GnuPlot's HTML5 canvas terminal for the dashboard of a in-house app. It's worth considering if Flotr2/Google Visualisations don't quite fit the bill.

http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_canvas/

antihero• 14 years ago

Could this be modified to output SVG perchance?

serverascode• 14 years ago

Will definitely be checking this out as I need some charts to go with my bottle + elixir + bootstrap + datatables admin backend. :)

epynonymous• 14 years ago

would be nice to have some tooltips.

photon137• 14 years ago

differences between this and jqPlot? (http://www.jqplot.com/index.php)

Flotr2 : a library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs

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