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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

It has been over a decade since I did any legitimate work in JavaScript. If I wanted to use this to make some pretty data displays, do I really need to install an ecosystem (npm, node, grunt, bower, more?) instead of just pointing a script tag to something.js?

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Wait another year, and you’ll be able to just import the custom element, e.g. <cool-chart> and configure it declaratively via content attributes :).

Yes, this is where things are going, but you'll still likely need to install <cool-chart> via npm or bower.

They do have a cdn url for the js and css. You can directly link to those:

https://cdnjs.com/libraries/plottable.js

The page above actually links to the following:

https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/plottable.js/2.2.0/pl...

Providing they give you a download to the compiled script, there's no reason you can't just point a script tag at the source file. You would only need node and the rest to modify the source code I assume as they would have setup build tasks with grunt etc.

The Readme[0] has links to a hosted version on a CDN, as well as a direct download

[0]: https://github.com/palantir/plottable#quick-start

I would look at Flot, it's just 1 file (plugins are additional files) and very simple to use. http://www.flotcharts.org/

I wouldn't. While it still works (and I use it in a project of mine), the last commit is two years old and there are more and more open issues. It's a dead project.

On the other hand, using the flavour-of-the month JS shiny thing until the CADTs jump ship is also burdensome. There is a lot to be said for stable libraries, let-alone stable ecosystems.

Totally agree. But there is a difference between stable and dead. Bugfixes matter. Taking care of issues would mean that things like "FF 51 breaks the tooltips" (fictional example) gets discovered and fixed. And one or two improvements a years also don't hurt.

IMHO that's a good thing. It's not changing, works very well, has lots of plugins and is a relatively small library so you can fix it yourself. Plus a large user base, so many problems you run into are already known.

These days you need to install all that shit just for hello-world.html

Check out any web dev project on github. Web developers are fucking insane.

https://unpkg.com/plottable@2.2.0

you don't need npm, node, grunt....just a build for the browser of the lib, i think it's called a umd build, and include it in your html file.

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