DViz

by Alan Kang (@alankang)

DViz is a declarative data visualization library written in Javascript.

What is Declarative Data Visualization?

I coined the term declarative data visualization to describe a way of embedding visual representations such as sparklines or conventional statistical charts into HTML document without using the hand-written scripts or graph drawing tools.

All you need to do is writing a plain HTML document. DViz then automatically detects data elements embedded in the document and turns them into cognitively efficient visualizations on the fly.

Documentation

Basic Usage

Paste following code into the <head> element of your HTML:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://akngs.github.com/dviz/css/dviz.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8.0.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/assets/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://akngs.github.com/dviz/js/dviz.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">$(function() {dviz.run();});</script>

Or you can add ?autorun=true parameter instead of direct call to dviz.run:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://akngs.github.com/dviz/css/dviz.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8.0.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/assets/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://akngs.github.com/dviz/js/dviz.js?autorun=true"></script>

And add dviz-content class to somewhere in the <body> tag. DViz will scan and process all elements in there:

<div class="dviz-content"> ... </div>

Now you can do some magic. Add following code into dviz-content area:

<p>Here goes sparkline: <code>1,3,6,3,5,2,4 (@sparkline)</p>

It will replace the <code> element into a sparkline.

Or you can draw a bar chart:

<pre>
   <code>
   Name, A, B
   Apple, 1323, 1232
   Orange, 3563, 2452
   Banana, 1356, 3222
   </code>
</pre>
<p><code>(@bar)</code></p>

DViz currently supports following declarations:

scatter (scatter plot)
scattermatrix (scatter plot matrix)
bar (horizontal bar chart)
line (line chart)
column (vertical bar chart)
area (area chart)
steppedarea (stepped area chart)
sparkline (sparkline)
table (table chart)
graph (force-directed graph)

See following examples:

Dependencies

jQuery (required)
twitter-bootstrap (required)
D3 (optional to render sparkline)
Google Visualization API (optional to render core charts)

You can explicitly load optional javascript files using script tags, but you can also let DViz to load them when they are needed.

Browser Support

DViz supports all major modern browsers including:

Safari (and Mobile Safari)
Chrome
Firefox
Opera
Internet Explorer 9+

License

Licensed under the MIT license.