As of now dashboards are mostly dependent on Flash based charting solutions for interactivity, but the challenge with Flash based solutions is that they don’t work cross platform (devices). Even SVG comes with its own set of performance issues. As a result, building cross platform dashboards is a challenge and most of the present HTML5 Canvas based solution are non-interactive – which makes it difficult to adopt HTML5 for dashboards.
And here comes HTML5 Canvas based data visualization library, CanvasJS. CanvasJS is an HTML5 & JavaScript based Data Visualization library that runs across devices including iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone 8, Desktops etc. This allows developers to create rich dashboards that work on all the devices without compromising on maintainability or functionality of web application.
How does CanvasJS compare with Fusioncharts and others?
Cofounder, Sunil Urs adds that ‘Fusion Charts is natively based on Flash that doesn’t run on Mobile Devices like iPad. They also have SVG based solution which comes with its own set of performance issues. CanvasJS is purely based on HTML5 Canvas Element & JavaScript which is supported by most modern devices’.
The team claims that CanvasJS is 10x faster than SVG & Flash based Solutions even when rendering 10,000 data-points and above (e.g. of 100,000 data-points). In the first version, CanvasJS supports 14 types of Charts including Line Chart, Area Chart, Column Chart, Bar Chart and comes in two themes.
CanvasJS is a product from Bangalore based Fenopix, which earlier launched the uber cool HashPlug chrome plugin that nicely marries Google search result with Twitter’s real time search.
If you are a developer, do give CanvasJS a spin and share your suggestion (aside, you get 50% off for being the early adopter of CanvasJS).
