Sometimes, having a lot of information at your disposal means nothing without a proper way to display that information to the ones who should check it out. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to do this, and today we’ll stop at D3, described as “a small, free JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data” on its official page.
This free, lightweight JavaScript library known as D3 (or d3.js, if you like it better this way) can be employed to build pages just like jQuery, but also as a visualisation framework similar to Protovis. The introduction of the official mumbo-jumbo goes like this: “D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document. As a trivial example, you can use D3 to generate a basic HTML table from an array of numbers. Or, use the same data to create an interactive SVG bar chart with smooth transitions and interaction.”
If the above doesn’t sound interesting enough, then I think you should take D3 for a spin – after all, it has no special requirements – as long as you have a Java-enabled Web browser at your disposal, of course. To take a look at the examples available at this time, you should check this page. Oh, yeah, one more thing – in case you’re wondering about the numbers, current version of D3 is not 3 (:P) but 1.8.3. I guess that’s all, folks! 😉
