Book Image

HTML5 Graphing and Data Visualization Cookbook

By : Ben Fhala
Book Image

HTML5 Graphing and Data Visualization Cookbook

By: Ben Fhala

Overview of this book

The HTML5 canvas tag makes creating any plot shape easy, all you have to do then is fill it with exciting visualizations written in JavaScript or using other visualization tools. "HTML5 Graphing and Data Visualization Cookbook" is the perfect break into the world of Canvas, charts, and graphs in HTML5 and JavaScript. In this book we will go through a journey of getting to know the technology by creating and planning data-driven visualizations. This cookbook is organized in a linear, progressive way so it can be read from start to finish, as well as be used as a resource for specific tasks.This book travels through the steps involved in creating a fully interactive and animated visualization in HTML5 and JavaScript. You will start from very simple "hello world"ù samples and quickly dive deeper into the world of graphs and charts in HTML5. Followed by learning how canvas works and carrying out a group of tasks geared at taking what we learned and implementing it in a variety of chart types. With each chapter the content becomes more complex and our creations become more engaging and interactive.Our goal is that by the end of this book you will have a strong foundation; knowing when to create a chart on your own from scratch and when it would be a good idea to depend on other APIs.We finish our book in our last two chapters exploring Google maps and integrating everything we learnt into a full project.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
HTML5 Graphing and Data Visualization Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Building a bubble chart


Although many items in our chart will have correlations with earlier charts that we created in Chapter 3, Creating Cartesian-based Graphs, we will start from scratch. Our goal is to create a chart that has bubbles in it—the bubbles enable us to showcase data with three data points (x, y, and the size of the bubble). This type of chart is really ideal when animated as it can showcase changes over time (it could showcase many years in a few seconds).

A great demo of the powers of bubble charts can be seen in a TED presentation by Hans Rosling (http://blog.everythingfla.com/2012/05/hans-rosling-data-vis.html).

Getting ready

We will start up our project with a canvas setup and skip the HTML end. If you have forgotten how to create it please refer to the Graphics with 2D Canvas recipe in Chapter 1, Drawing Shapes in Canvas.

There are three major steps:

  • Creating the data source

  • Creating the background

  • Adding the chart data info into the chart

How to do it...

Let's list the steps...