If you want to do dynamic visualisation with something like Python or R in a browser you need need a server, and that incurs significant latency.
D3 also allows much more fine grained control over visualisations than any visualisation library or package I’ve worked with in any language, because you have total control of every line, point, every fill.
No matter what crazy design the design team comes up with for your website, D3 will let you bind data to it and turn it into a workable chart.
It was written by an editor at the New York Times, and it is designed for producing bespoke visualisations on public facing showcase pages where appearances and speed have to be state of the art.
Not true. Bokeh (http://bokeh.pydata.org) lets you build interactive web graphics that run purely embedded in a static HTML file. No server needed.
(Of course, it also has a server-based mode that lets you build interactive analytical viz apps, with browser interactions automagically driving Python callbacks)
It's not so much for people wanting to make new 'instances' of a visualisation. It's more for people wanting to make new 'classes' of visualisations.
It is oriented around the lifecycles of instances of data - eg entry and exit hooks to run as data appears and disappears, and it has a lot of powerful lower level functionality.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...
d3 is for interactive charts
Write Python, make interactive web plots.
I played with D3 every now and then for maybe the past 6 years to scratch some data visualization itch, but I never really understood it. I always wound up trying a code snippet from a random blog and got frustrated when I couldn't get it to bend to my needs.
It finally clicked for me a after I read the first few introductory tutorials on the D3 Github wiki. It made me realize that, while it was probably built for data visualizations, D3 at its core is a browser DOM manipulation library with a (data-driven) declarative API. It's a slightly higher level of abstraction compared to the DOM manipulation part of jQuery (though, many frontend developers these days consider jQuery to be a low-level library).
Of course, it also helped that I learned a lot over 6 years. I was a university student back then, and now I'm a professional software engineer who has spent the last year or so doing frontend development. D3 makes a lot of sense within the context of my current understanding of how browser DOM APIs work.
I am disinclined by temperament to use low level tools for tasks that really should have a sensible generic abstraction. I know some people's brains err in the other direction - each to their own.
(I'm pretty sure tools exist. I used https://bokeh.pydata.org a few years ago when I needed something along these lines. I looked at d3 and had a similar reaction to the grandfather comment)
I was under the impression that a lot of higher level libraries were built on it.
I pretty much only use javascript for d3, and I put it down for a while. Recently I decided to do something with d3 v5.0[1], and got confused about the state of ES6 modules. Has anyone gotten rollup to work with d3? Is it possible to just use ES6 modules natively in the browser if you don't care about older browsers?
My other issue was with async/await. It seems like when I used async await on a locally hosted csv file, it could take between 1 and 2 seconds to load. For my colleague sometimes minutes. When I switched to d3 v4.0 and the old callback approach, it loaded instantly, even for my colleague. What gives?
Yes. Note that you need to use
<script type=module>
Here is my Makefile in case you'd like to look at the arguments I pass to Closure compiler: https://github.com/ctsrc/Infinite-Tower-Run/blob/191a4035fd1...
Babel (transpiler) is super easy to setup if you have any problems with compatibility.
Nowadays if I need to do interactive visualisations I typically end up using Mobx + SVG.js. It works really well and I rarely get other developers asking me to explain how it works so that's a HUGE plus.
It let's you modularize your d3 code into components. Very handy!