Éric Marty | @allopole
Visualization Tools Built on D3
The D3 / Vega “stack” (from the creators of D3):
The in-house family of higher-level tools built on top of Mike Bostock’s D3. Mike Bostock developped D3 at the Stanford Visualization Group, led by Jedff Heer. The lab moved to the University of Washington and became the Interactive Data Lab (IDL). IDL/Stanford Vis Group built the Vega declarative visusaliation language on top of D3, Vega-Lite (a simplified declarative language) on top of that, and is building a small suite of exploratory data analysis and design tools on top of Vega and Vega Lite. (IDL is also behind Tableau and the spinoff company Trifacta that makes it.)
Third-Party Tools built on D3
Here are a numer of third-party languages, environments and tools built on top of D3.
• Mid-level (js)
nvd3.js — many standard chart types
c3.js — many standard chart types
dimple.js — for business
xcharts.js — simple charts, few options
• Specialized Mid-level (js)
Crossfilter — large, cross-linked multivariate datasets in the browser
cubism.js — scalable, realtime animated, time series visualisations
JSNetworkX — networks
• High-level data exploration
raw by Density Design. Drag and drop editor outputs d3 code.
• Visual Programming Environments
vvvv.js — in-browser version of the VVVV visual programming environment (built on D3).
• Full GUI Web Apps
Plot.ly
Web interface for D3 (see below). Free (public charts only). Can export to SVG. Powerful. Private charts require a paid subscirption. tutorials
Dashboards.ly
Layout multiple Plotly charts on a single page and publish.
Compare to:
Tableau - desktop + online drag/drop visualization editor. Publish to web. Pro version is $1000. Free student license.). Tableau Public (also free). tutorials Tableau is NOT built on top of D3, but came out of the same group that made D3, and is based on Grammar of Graphics. So, it is conceptually similar to Plotly (and Vega). Orginally called Polaris, it was commercialized as Tableau when the Stanford/IDL group created the company Trifacta.
• D3 wrappers in other languages
rCharts — extensible R wrapper. Supports many charting libraries, including NVD3, Polychart, Morris, Rickshaw, xCharts, HighCharts, and Leaflet for mapping.
Shiny - extensible web application framework for R
D3.py — python library for generating d3-based plots, using the panda module. See also: vincent, a python to Vega translator
Plotly also has API’s for the major scientific computing languages (Matlab, R, Python), so a round-about way to leverage D3 without actually using it.
• Other people’s lists of D3 based tools
Tony Hirst: Climbing the d3.js Visualisation Stack
Marielle Lange: D3lib
Mike McDearmon: Data Visualization Libraries Based on D3.JS