Hi guys, welcome to {FOSS}-4EVER. Today I'm going to start a new article series, it's about D3.js. What it is? & Why it is? here we go.
D3 stands for Data Driven Documents. It's a JavaScript library for data visualization purpose.
http://d3js.org/ is their official website, you can find official documentation and examples here. D3 helps you to represent your data{even messy data} in a more attractive way. D3.js is using HTML, SVG and CSS to make your data visualization experience.
Why we call it Data Driven Documents? What are the data? Who is driving here? What are the documents? Data is what we are providing to arrange in a more attractive way. D3 represents data visualizations by editing documents in it's own way, these documents are HTML documents. To represent the visualization D3 connects your data with documents, it's the driving part, D3 is the driver here.
How does D3 works? It loads data to your browser memory. And then it binds data to elements within the document, if needed it creates new elements. Then it transforms these elements by setting it's visual properties.
is D3 a powerful library? Yes it is. But there are several things D3 can do, and can't do. In brief D3 doesn't,
- Generate predefined visualizations.
- Support very old browsers.
- Handle bitmap map tile. When geo mapping you have to go all-SVG and stick with D3.
- Hide your original data. If your data can’t be shared, then don’t use D3.
D3 is not perfect if,
- You need a quick start.
- You don't have time to code it from the scratch.
- You need to support old browsers.
- You can't relay on recent technologies like SVG
Then there are several alternatives like Flot, gRaphael.
Before getting started with D3 you should have some basic idea about followings,
- How does the web works,
- HTML
- DOM
- CSS
- JavaScript
- SVG
This is an introduction about D3.js, in the next article I'll discuss about the Fundamentals of D3.js, if you have any ideas or doubts please comment here. See you soon. Bye.
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