I have a django app and I would like to display some graphical data visualization to my users. I am looking for an easy-to-use package that would allow me to add graphs and widgets.
The kind of widget I want to build is a kind of speedometer dial that is red at one end and green at the other. As a user completes their job over the day, the graphic/widget adjusts itself. The dial moves from red to green.
I also want an S-curve graphic that shows the cumulative amount of work accomplished against planned. That is kind of an x/y line plot.
My question are: How easy is this to implement? Are there any add-ins libraries or packages that do this already? I am trying to keep my entire application open-source. I've seen a couple subscription services that do this type of thing, but I can't stomach the cost.
I don't mind using ajax or jquery to implement such a thing, but I would like the most elegant and maintainable solution.
Any advice or examples on how to tackle this project?
There are lots of good javascript libraries these days, but all require some effort to learn how to use. I have not found one that really is easy to use, I guess because everyone wants something different. My general experience has been the more effort you put into learning them, the more you get out.
Google has gauges: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/gauge.html
Also
http://www.flotcharts.org/
http://philogb.github.com/jit/
http://www.highcharts.com/
http://www.jqplot.com/
Or really take control:
http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/
As first, see the following grid (https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/dashboard-applications/) on djangopackages.
Not sure if that's exactly what's asked for, but you might take a look at django-dash (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-dash).
It allows each user to make his own dashboard (from plugins available). Those dashboards can be made public.
Some screenshots (http://pythonhosted.org/django-dash/#screenshots).
It's modular and plugin based, so you need to make a plugin and widgets for every specific feature (in this particular case - the speedometer plugin and widgets for it). Each plugin/widget can include own JS/CSS when being rendered.
See the following chart usage examples:
D3.js integration examples (https://github.com/barseghyanartur/django-dash/tree/master/example/example/d3_samples).
Polychart2.js integration example (https://github.com/barseghyanartur/django-dash/blob/master/example/example/bar/).
protovis is no longer under active development, but they started a new poject: http://d3js.org/
You may choose from these packages:
https://www.djangopackages.com/search/?q=dash
Related
we're maintaining some Qt applications which are running on Linux and Windows desktops. Now, we want to make the applications more attractive by adding customized forms and reports for each customer or at least groups of customers. There may be 10 or more different versions needed.
As we come from Qt, we are wondering how to manage so many configurations and if there already is a framework/development system that would help us here. We were looking at QML/Qt Quick, WT Toolkit or even NC Reports for the reporting part.
Managing configurations and deriving different versions from a base is not a feature which is discussed or promoted.
There should be a clean distinction between Display and Application Logic (Model/View)
Nice would be a textual GUI description, which enables us to release changes in forms or reports without the need to reinstall the whole applications (like QML seems to have that)
Also nice would be a kind of report generator, that helps to create forms and reports for new customers without the need to code them (and so releases our core developers from boring work)
Has somebody experience with such kind of customer based configurations? It would be nice to have a hint what's the best way to do this in the Qt surrounding.
I know comparisons like http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.1/qtdoc/topics-ui.html#comparison, but the specific questions that I have are not mentioned.
best regards
I guess you need to differentiate applications in three aspects:
1. appearance - if the application only differs in button color, icon image and background themes, qt's style sheet is light and convenient, you can choose to deploy different qss file and load different ones without recoding. if the variance among customers concerns layouts or available widgets (some has buttons, some use combo boxes, .etc), style sheet cannot meet the requirement, QML seems promising in such case.
business logic - i'm not sure how "generating reports" differs for different customers, if the reports need to be printed, or saved as document, i don't think qt provides good toolkit (QXXXDocument is not suitable to generate / display large amount of document), html? maybe. And i agree with #hyde that loading different plugins or dynamic libraries can solve this.
What I learnt from 8 month qt:
Model/View Architecture is there, for example a tree view that we fill with voyage data. the data is gatheres from several db tables, so we have a good logical distinction.
We hadn't the time to work us into qml, so we stuck with qt designer. It's quite easy, so we're fine with that. Delivering changes in customer forms without recompile will be a feature for a bigger future rework.
Same with report generators...
I have recently implemented some data visualisation using d3.js, I'm now trying to get this to work for Internet Explorer browser versions 7 and above. The common suggestion to get this to work, is to combine d3.js with raphael.js, which is a cross browser graphics library.
There already seem to be some implementations of such libraries such as
r2d3.js :
d34raphael.js :
I'm trying to understand if these existing implementation already have d3's capability of data binding and the physics implementation of the force layout to implement something as simple as this d3 example : http://bl.ocks.org/1095795
I have been looking into this too and a number of options came up.
Chrome Frame - A browser plug-in that actually uses chrome underneath, meaning SVG just works. This is great if you're able to deploy plugins to the browser, for a real commercial environment however this may not be possible.
SVG Web - The aim is it bring SVG to all browsers. It looks like a fairly large project, one that's had Google's input. This doesn't however work out of the box with D3 though I don't know much about the issues.
D34Raphael - You've mentioned this one, I found again it doesn't work out of the box. Check the project out on GitHub, there hasn't been any commit activity in months and there's some pull requests "first pass on trying to get support for .on() required for event binding". If it doesn't support events, is that an issue to you? I'd generally keep away from this one.
R2D3 - Again another one you mentioned. I took the Sankey example from the D3 website and had to make a few changes to get it working. The main things I couldn't get working (Drag Events, Groups - though can use an alternative). It took about a day of effort to get the example working in IE8 and I believe is in a useable state. The project on GitHub is also much more active, the developer is committing, pulling work in and is very active on discussions etc. This gets my vote.
A project I am working on makes extensive use of CFCHART. We have run into quite a few usage and performance issues with CFCHART, so I have been tasked to look at some third-party solutions to try out and recommend. Anybody have some reviews and recommendations they'd care to share?
Consider outputting the raw data and using JavaScript / Canvas to generate the charts on the fly. The load is the given to the client.
This makes it easier for screenreaders and people who like to save the data to access it as well.
Some JS charting libraries:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/
http://code.google.com/p/flot/
http://codecanyon.net/item/graphup-jquery-plugin/108025?redirect_back=true&ref=1stwebdesigner&clickthrough_id=23945276
http://www.highcharts.com/
Not dependent on your server side technology (e.g. irrelevant to the fact that you're using CF), I have recently started playing around with HighCharts (http://www.highcharts.com/), and have been very impressed.
Bear in mind, it's not free for commercial use, but you didn't specify as to any such restrictions. Although their pricing seems pretty fair (see http://www.highcharts.com/license)
The Wijmo jQuery library has some nice charting widgets. http://wijmo.com/
We use FusionCharts. They have a comprehensive set of chart and widget types (eg sparklines) and have a very slick, professional finish.
ChartDirector is reasonable and is very advanced. It generates image-based graphs and we don't have to worry about whether or not different browsers support various advanced HTML features or Flash. You can download it, install and run it unlicensed and it will only add a little copyright in the bottom-right 20 pixels of the graph. (Licensing is inexpensive.) It comes with 239+ ColdFusion scripts so that you have plenty of sample code. Their support forums is very active and helpful.
http://www.advsofteng.com/cdcoldfusion.html
Check out the gallery. It has some very impressive samples. You can create just about anything.
http://www.advsofteng.com/gallery.html
You can try jqChart as well.
Thank you to everyone for these suggestions! This gives me a good list of applications to work with. Since there is no one "right" answer for a question like this I made sure to note each answer as useful.
I am a computer programmer by training but have been away from web development for a while. I am doing a little bit of background research on various Python web development frameworks. I understand that Django, Grok / Zope 3, and Pylons are all good solid frameworks, but have little in the way of background working with them. Can someone explain to me the difference in approach of the each of the frameworks, and where one shines when compared to the others?
My specific use case is in building a web application that will recommend products to users based on a variety of user supplied information. Thus, it will take a fair bit of user input in the shape of a basic profile, product preferences, attempt to establish social relationships between users. It will also need to support staff uploading products into the system with labeled features that can be then matched to users.
On the last point, would parts of Plone help with providing an interface for non-tech people to upload products and descriptions of the products? Are piece of Plone easy to borrow? Seems like I shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of having a way for people to upload items for sale / recommendation along with some metadata to describe the items. Thanks for the help.
Based on your background and requirements, I'd advise you to go with something like http://pinaxproject.com/ which is based on Django.
Pyramid (the successor to Pylons) is a very low-level framework and you need to either choose the libraries or write all your application code yourself. For someone experienced this makes sense and gives you full control over your code. But it is a bit of a hurdle if you start from scratch and aren't familiar with the available libraries.
Django and Grok are both high level frameworks, with Django being the more popular choice. If you aren't familiar yet with using object databases or URL traversal, Grok is more time consuming to learn.
Plone is not suited for your use-case. It's a content management system and not a general web framework. Very little of the libraries it uses can be reused in a different context, certainly none of its UI. If you want to provide an engaging user experience with personalized content, Plone isn't for you - that's not what its been build to handle.
Disclaimer: I'm a release manager for Plone and Zope 2 / Zope Toolkit and have used Pyramid but not Django.
Dolmen project is a CMS built on top of Grok. Is very simple, but there are very few that use it. If you go with Grok, you could be able to reuse the GUI.
But As Hanno said, Grok is more time-consuming to learn than Django. Also Django has far more users than Grok.
The advantage of using Grok is that you can profit from Zope Component Architecture almost without writing ZCML and using decorators instead.
With Pyramid/Pylons you get a very simple framework and nothing else. It is a decoupled framework, so you are free to use whatever templating enginge you want (Mako, Genshi, Jinja, Cheetah), you are free to choose sqlalchemy, zodb, mongoDb, etc., and you are also free to choose the url mapping scheme (traversal vs. django-style mapping or a combination of both). You can also use ZCA here if you want. For starters this might become quite confusing or verbose.
Django is a kind of monolithic framework that gives you one way to do stuff. That's why it's easy to learn and a very good option. But, in my experience, you sometimes get to a point where you want to deviate from Django standards and it simply cannot be done without patching a bunch of stuff.
And, as for Zope3, I'd recommend you to download a copy of BlueBream and se how it does for you.
As a Plone user I can say that creating Content Objects in Plone is difficult. There is not much documentation on how to do it and it is complicated. Some recommend using UML and specialized Plone products to make it easier but that introduces yet another dependency.
I mention the problem with content objects because your "products" (not the same as a Plone product) would probably be represented in Plone as a content object which you would need to write yourself.
Plone is best when users and editors are entering and approving text in the form of news articles, press releases, photos etc. When that is the use case there are predefined content objects for such things so one does not need to write them oneself.
--Jonathan Mark
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One of the first things I do when I'm on a new project is design a database model. To visualize the model I use a 7 year old version of Smartdraw. Maybe it's time for something new. What is the ultimate program to make a drawing of a database model. Smartdraw is for Windows only. Is there something that can be used on unix as well?
The best tool is pencil and paper.
Perhaps not the answer you are looking for, but sometimes the most simple solution is the best. :-)
A whiteboard (and camera to take a picture afterwards)
Your brain is the best drawing tool.
I prefer to develop a database schema in a simple text file.
At first it contains just the table names, attributes and foreign keys:
company:
company_name
...
employee:
name
age
company_name -> company
...
...:
The syntax is not important.
It just needs to be clearly arranged and easy to change.
Later I add types and CHECK() constraints,
so the text file gradually transforms into valid SQL code.
Using a drawing tool in that early stage is just distracting,
because it encourages to waste your time with moving reactangles.
Instead, let your brain build a picture of the schema
in the same way it creates fantasy pictures while reading a book.
As the schema grows,
it becomes necessary to support the brain by creating an overview.
Here, however, pencil and paper are faster than any drawing software.
Also note that there is no need to clutter an overview with unimportant details.
Just sketch the table names and the most important relationships (foreign keys).
Any further details will decrease the value of this overview.
However, if you really feel more comfortable with extremely detailed graphics than with text files and overview graphics, you might want to try
DBDesigner4
or
WWW SQL Designer.
I'm happy using Sybase PowerDesigner for years now.
Did you take a look at Visio 2007 SQL Server Add-In?
You can find it here: http://dbalink.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/microsoft-office-visio-2007-professional-sql-server-add-in/
WWW SQL Designer is one of the best that I've seen, which is pretty amazing since it is all javascript. It can also import and export xml and sql code of everything you draw. And they've added nifty bezier curves since I last used it.
I don't know if it's the "ultimate" program for drawing database models, but I use Visio. Unfortunately, it only runs in Windows.
On the upside, I can create my own shapes, or modify existing ones, and save them in collections called stencils. I can also make my shapes "smart" by programming them to do various things when I double click on them.
I use a whiteboard and a camera as well. I second the pencil and paper. I keep a pen(cil) and pad of paper with me almost always because I am forever designing something in my head and need to jot it down. I like Visio as well but my favorite software program to use has always been ERWin. The price of that thing is just way out line, but it is great.
I like ERWin. Not Cheap, but it can reverse engineer or do initial design + generate CRUD and manipulate db structure. Viso is pretty good for this too, but its not as complete and of course as strong MS SQL leanings is capabilities.
I used to use Visio, but if your database server is MySQL, try MySQL Workbench. It has a linux version as well as a win32 version. Like their other GUI products it has its fair share of quirks, but it works quite well and has the ability to create a diagram of a schema and a schema from a diagram.
I also agree that a pencil and paper, or whiteboard and camera is a great way to sketch things out, but I do like the GUI tools for putting down an idea which is a bit more well formed or complicated.
I like to use the open-source mind-mapping program Freemind. It's similar to designing with pencil and paper in that there's not a lot of surface complexity to interrupt the design process.
But it has two huge advantages over paper/pencil:
node folding
easy drag-and-drop re-arranging
It is very easy to navigate the interface without using the mouse within about five minutes. You can add as many or as few details as you like and can always fold up the details to de-clutter your view. Here's a sample screenshot:
The circles at the ends of the Departments, Employees, and Hours tables indicate that there are more nodes that are folded up. You can go crazy with different fonts, background colors, and even HTML formatting. I just did a [Ctrl]-[B] to make my table names Bold.
FreeMind--and mind-mapping software in general--provides its biggest benefit by staying out of the way of the creative process. It's the first tool I turn to when starting a new project from scratch.
NOTE: I've only ever used the program on Windows, but it is available on Linux.
DIA is not bad, and there are tools to actually generate some code from some types of models. If you are using PostgreSQL, there is even a tool for going the other way, pg-autodoc.
DIA is available for Unix, and I believe Windows as well.
I used to use Viso but now, as I'm more Mac based I use Omnigraffle.
I do have to admit though, as andyUK does, I do a rough sketch on paper.
It also depends on what Database you're using. If it's MySQL then there are quite a few visual development tools available, just have a google
There may be more technical programs, but I use SmartDraw. I would also like to note that 'ultimate' is up to your circumstances. Find what works best for you or you and your company. What works for you is the 'ultimate'.
Brainstorm/sketch the database on paper/whiteboard first, and then go with a diagram tool.
Which tool depends on your target database. We use SQL Server and thus the designer in SQL Server Management Studio works great for us, since we create the database itself at the same time.
For linux I use umbrello
If you're looking for a cheap solution/tool without any reverse/forward engineering capabilities, MS Visio might be your best bet. However, if you're planning to invest some money toward ERD tool, spend it on ER/Studio.
I used to use and be champion of ERWIN. As soon as I started to use ER/Studio, I became fan of it. I'm an enterprise data architect at one of the Fortune 100 company and I don't know how to get my work done without it.
PS: I don't have no affiliations with any of those products and companies.
OpenOffice has a vector drawing tool, and Inkscape is a another good one.
Otherwise, you can use Graphviz (dot language) to generate such diagram out of a textual description.
There are also some tools to generate such diagram out of an existing database (I first thought it was what you were asking).
If you don't need much take Dia.
I used Power Designer. It's powerful but rather complex.