At the http://taucharts.com it says "Free open source D3.js-based library" but in the tutorial at http://api.taucharts.com/tutorials/5min.html it says "free for non-commercial use". At GitHub it is sporting Apache License, Version 2.0 which - if I am not mistaken - allows commercial use. Could you please clear that up for me? Am I allowed to use it in commercial products (like a website made for one of my clients) or not? Thanks.
I still find charting tools that do not allow interaction with the a group of charts to enable further filtering very lacking. The gold standard I evaluate any charting library against is http://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/
My reasoning is that most dashboards should be designed to enable data to tell a story and enable users to interact and create their own story.
As a taucharts developer, I would give you a "best comment" award :)
Actually taucharts is moving to this direction. We want to simplify API for dashboards and composite charts to allow users create "visual stories". Stay tuned :)
I think the reason dc.js works so well is that it is tightly coupled to crossfilter (http://square.github.io/crossfilter/). This manages the multi-dimensional views that dc.js leverages to render charts.
When developing, the chart bit is usually the easiest bit to implement. Getting the data set into the views you need is where you spend a lot of time.
Please don't use the combination of red and green as early option for category colors. Many people have color vision problems and that combinations is very problematic for them.
If your goal is to express ideas and get someone to contribute/download/convert, I don't think that's a minor nitpick at all. It was pretty painful to read certain parts.
Actually I personally like the concept of Vega but in my humble opinion the protocol is too academic, implementation goes too slowly so I doubt that Vega suits for real world application.
So, if I get this right, being 'data-friendly' sums up to using data in the form [ {val1: 1, val2: 2}, {val1: 2, val2: 3}] and then mapping x: 'val1', y: 'val2' instead of something like {x: [1,2], y: [2,3]}. The former assumes that the input data comes in a csv or a similar format. This makes charting computed data (à la MATLAB or numpy/matplotlib) rather awkward.
What I want with such charting solutions is something to export or copy and paste data from excel and put it into a chart. Just that. No need to manually edit a javascript file or html code beyond customising the appearance once the data is in there. Is this available somewhere?
D3 has an importer for tabular data, and looks like Taucharts uses D3 under the hood.
That said, it would be cool if there was some kind of composer interface that would allow you to point-at/paste/import data, then save the visualization as a single page HTML snippet - like a small Tiddlywiki for data.
My first impression could not be better - it seems to be simple to use and it looks good. BTW, when you click on the Facebook button at the bottom of the page, the sharing box is under that disqus box - you might want to fiddle with z-index or something.
I wonder how this compares to VarianceCharts - https://variancecharts.com/ (besides the license). They both claim to get inspiration from the grammar of graphics.
As far as I understand from quick review the projects are quite similar. But variancecharts don't have facets and not free for commercial use. Difference in API doesn't matter. Taucharts can be wrapped to webcomponent and described on the page using tag as well.
I'm happy you noticed that :) Obviously this is a corrupted row in a data so you can try "exclude" feature of tooltip plugin to remove this record from the chart in one click
Basic Geo charts are already there, but not documented so far.
In future we are going to support all type of visualizations from Grammar of Graphic, so it includes spider chart as well. In fact it is Polar Parallel chart and it will be possible to create it when support of polar coordinates will be added.
Given that you called them facets, I'm going to assume you're familiar with ggplot2. In retrospect, I thinking adding non-Cartesian coordinate systems was a mistake. They are a huge amount of work and only make a handful of charts easier (and most of which, like the radar chart, are not that useful).
Friendly speaking, we didn't make a performance or optimization research yet. I can only share an experience we've got from using taucharts in our main product - "Targetprocess".
So we setup a limit to 1000 rows (+/-50%) which seems to be acceptable performance / usefulness balance to draw a chart within a 0.5 seconds.
Also it depends on chart type. Drawing huge facet with more than 100 cells in it can be painful while plain scatter plot on the same data works fine.
Currently taucharts supports scatter, bar (vertical / horizontal), stacked bar (vertical / horizontal), line. Also in beta we have geomap charts with customized map and parallel coordinates. There is a lack of documentation.. but we are working on this problem.
