Plotly

Chart Libraries

There are many web chart libraries out there for all types of use cases. When choosing a library, you should consider checking whether or not the library is still being actively developed.

d3.js is one of the most popular (and complex!) javascript data visualization libraries. This library is still actively being developed, which you can tell because the latest commit to the d3 GitHub repository is fairly recent.

Other options include chart.js , Google Charts , and nvd3.js , which is built on top of d3.js

Why Plotly

For this lesson, we've chosen plotly for a specific reason: Plotly, although a private company, provides open source libraries for both JavaScript and Python.

Because the web app you're developing will have a Python back-end, you can use the Python library to create your charts. Rather than having you learn more JavaScript syntax, you can use the Python syntax that you already know. However, you haven't built a back-end yet, so for now, you'll see the basics of how Plotly works using the JavaScript library. The syntax between the Python and Javascript versions is similar.

Later in the lesson, you'll switch to the Python version of the Plotly library so that you can prepare visualizations on the back-end of your web app. Yet you could write all the visualization code in JavaScript if you wanted to. Watch the screencast below to learn the basics of how Plotly works, and then continue on to the Plotly exercise.

Here are a few links to some helpful parts of the plotly documentation:

• javascript examples
• getting started
• linking to the plotly library

Introduction to Plotly

Screencast goes here