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Comment by asabil | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, but after discovering Vega[1], I can't quite imagine using a template based charting library again.

The declarative markup is interesting for custom datasets. But without some sort of UI builder it's unusable by clients.

Oh wow, thanks for this!

Side note: Anyone know why "calendars" don't qualify as part of these packages? I just have a series of data and want to render it on a calendar-graph instead of some typical data rendering... too abstract?

Have you looked at ECharts? https://ecomfe.github.io/echarts-examples/public/index.html#...

Exactly this, thanks!

How does this compare to highcharts? Both use a JSON configuration to generate charts.

https://www.highcharts.com/

Highcharts requires a paid license.

Wow, this is great. Thanks for sharing the link.

How does this compare to nvd3 etc?

Very different, nvd3 and pretty much all charting libraries are built around the idea of charting templates. What Vega (and its simplified cousin Vega-lite) provide is a grammar for describing the mapping between the data space and the visual space.

What this essentially means is that you are able to build your own visualisations. If you for instance check this sample[1], and in the JSON editor, inside the "encoding" section you swap x with y, and y with x, then click on the parse button, the chart will be redrawn with the x and y axis flipped.

[1] https://vega.github.io/new-editor/?mode=vega-lite&spec=bar_a...

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