David's Computer Stuff Journal

I have a number of different email addresses that all wind up in my gmail account. Some of them are personal, some business. Gmail is smart enough to use a particular email address in your reply when someone writes to you with it, but it would be nice if it went a step further and looked at what address you normally use with a given person, and defaulted to that, so that whenever I write person A, it uses the business address, and switches to the personal address when I write new emails to person B.

I guess that's one of the problems with relying on software you don't have the source code to.

I've been doing some work on LangPop.com, and one of the things I'd like to do is update the chart software. What I have now, Plotr seems to work ok, but being the tinkering type, I want to fix things, even if they're not broke. Truth be told, my worry is that Plotr isn't maintained any more, so it would be a good idea to find something that's receiving a bit of attention.

The candidates:

• Flot

• Flotr

• ProtoChart

These seem to be fairly up to date in the sense that someone worked on them recently. There are some older ones like PlotKit, that do not appear to be maintained any more. It is entirely possible that I missed a good one. Another possibility would be to use Google's chart API, but I'd rather be a little bit more in control of things than to farm that out, and I also am planning on doing some interactive features in the near(ish) future.

So let's have a look:

Flot

Based on JQuery, this one looks fairly complete, and has a lot of different, nice looking charts. Since I don't really care what library it's based on JQuery seems as good as any other, being quite popular these days. Installation is pretty simple, and, having good defaults, it's easy to get nice looking data up on the screen in short order.

Flotr

Modeled after Flot, Flotr uses Prototype (the Rails default) instead of JQuery, and is the follow up to Plotr. I'm not quite sure what the motivation was behind the name/project change, but this seems to be where the guy is spending his time. Since he did a good job with Plotr, this one seemed worth a look too.

ProtoChart

This one is based on Prototype too. It immediately annoyed me by uncompressing from the .zip file in the current directory, scattering files around. I've always found this behavior a bit antisocial. This code claims to be "motivated by Flot, Flotr and PlotKit libraries", which indicate that it's fairly recent. However, my feeling is that the problem is not necessarily how old code is in these projects, but how quickly they spring up, bloom, and then stagnate. I'd like to use something that's got some staying power... But anyway, ProtoChart looks like pretty good code, even if the distribution is a bit minimal, and doesn't come with examples.

If you look at LangPop.com, you'll notice something that's very important for my choice: I need a barchart that has horizontal bars, rather than the more traditional vertical bars. This is because it would be quite difficult to squeeze so many languages across the screen horizontally. This ended up being the deciding factor: like Plotr, Flotr supports horizontally oriented bar charts, making it the obvious choice. The other two libraries looked pretty good too - Flot, in particular, looks like quite solid code.

So, there you have it - very brief reviews of an incomplete selection of libraries! In my defense, the goal is to attempt to dominate my maximizing nature, pick one, and get on with doing some cool stuff with LangPop. I do, however, welcome comments and suggestions.

Someone suggested the clever idea of counting IRC channel users as a metric to use for langpop.com, so I went ahead and gathered that data. Since this is the first month, there are a few glitches (I missed #fortran - sorry guys), and a thing or two to iron out, but I thought I'd go ahead and publish the new results. IRC counts towards the "discussion" portion of the stats, rather than the main part. Like everything else, it has its biases - I used the Freenode network, which is definitely more about free software than other places might be. One number that really jumps out is just how popular the Haskell channel is - it's right up there with all the most popular languages. It will be interesting to see if, over several years, all the "talk" about Haskell starts to translate into people using it for fun and for their jobs.

I welcome comments on this post, but there's also a Google group I've set up for discussion of the results, data sources, languages, and so on:

http://groups.google.com/group/langpop/

Another idea I'm kicking around is to create a separate page for "up and coming" languages, stuff like Scala, Clojure, F#... that kind of thing. It might have to use different metrics, because the newer languages often don't show up on many of the ones I use for the languages we currently have.