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What are some good visualization libraries for online use? Are they easy to use and is there good documentation?

kjetil b halvorsen
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vrish88
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5 Answers5

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IMO, Protovis is the best and is very well documented and supported. It is the basis for my webvis R package.

These are also very good, although they have more of a learning curve:

Shane
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    Protovis looks awesome but do you know what browser support it has? particularly IE? – vrish88 Jul 21 '10 at 01:39
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    That's unfortunately one of Protovis's weak points (but it's an issue with any SVG library because IE doesn't support that). Fortunately, Jamie Love has come up with a solution using SVGWeb. See here: http://groups.google.com/group/protovis/browse_thread/thread/1a80f98a16736658?pli=1. – Shane Jul 21 '10 at 13:37
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    IE 9 will also support SVG- so as long as you don't need to work with IE 6... – Sharpie Jul 21 '10 at 15:08
  • d3 is the successor to protovis. – ymihere Jan 17 '12 at 09:49
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RaphaelJS can do some pretty amazing stuff and it just got some major backing from Sencha (formerly ExtJS). Raphael is pretty smart about browsers by using a VML backend for Internet Explorer and SVG for everything else. However, the library is pretty low-level. Fortunately, the author has started another project, gRaphael, that focuses on drawing charts and graphs.

The MIT SIMILE Project also has some interesting JavaScript libraries:

There is also a project to port Processing to JavaScript: ProcessingJS

Jmol is a Java applet for viewing chemical structures, but it is used as the display engine for 3D graphics in the SAGE system, which has a completely browser-based GUI.

And for an open source alternative to Google Maps, there is the excellent OpenLayers JavaScript library which powers the frontend of the equally excellent OpenStreetMap.

Sharpie
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Pierre
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There are hundreds of them. Here is a useful review of some twenty of them: http://bigdata-madesimple.com/review-of-20-best-big-data-visualization-tools/

Maksim
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I would recommend ChartJS, it's simple, beauty and well supported.

Adelson Araújo
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