Plotting library

[dmaretskyi]

Research goals

• Plotting library can be callable from a node process, opens a separate window to draw plots
• (sub goal) Library just works in the browser environment and we implement the windowing logic using Electron
• Wide range of plot types: line, hist, markers on plots, stacked plots
• Bonus points for athtetics 👉👈

Ploting packages:

- ✅ Chart.js:

• Simple HTML5 Charts using the canvas element chartjs.org
• supports Node but returns PNG file Enable running on node chartjs/Chart.js#5324
• Massive adoption ~2M weakly downloads

- ❌✅ chartjs-node-canvas:

• Repo is not active, 01/2022 last activity
• Adds canvases on top of Chart.js png render functionality

- ❌chartjs-node:

• Last commit in 2018, so not supported

- ❌Highcharts

• Browser only

- ❌React-chartjs-2

• React components for data visualization

- ❌d3

• Browser only

- ✅ danfojs-node

• allows to use danfo in node

Proposed windowing layer design (in case the library is browser-only)

• Host Node process (the one where library is used from) spawns a http api server on a random port (choosen by OS).
• Host process spawns a child electron process passing API port through argv or env variable.
• API has one endpoint that returns an event stream controlling graph state.
• Electron process calls the events endpoint and uses events to control what is drawn.
• Library has an API on the host side to produce events to change what is drawn.