http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/tag/javascript en-us 40 <p>One of the things I love about programming is that you are always learning new things. You <em>have</em> to learn new things to keep up.</p> <p>One of the benefits of using the Plotr Javascript library for the language popularity stats I did is that instead of having to download separate images for each statistic, a user just fetches the library once and then a few small bits of data for each chart, which is probably a net savings, especially when I start to add more statistics. However, Plotr, plus its various supporting libraries, is fairly hefty, so I needed to find a way to compress it. One of the helpful people on the freenode IRC network's #javascript channel pointed me at Yahoo's <a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/">YUI Compressor</a>, which is a nicely done project that squeezes quite a bit out of Javascript files. I would recommend it to anyone else who needs to pare down their production JS files to the bare minimum. Best of all, it's available under a very liberal open source license!</p> <p>Incidentally, over the course of the language stats project, I was surprised at how much helpful stuff Yahoo provides, first and foremost, a real <a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/search/">API for their search engine</a>, something that Google no longer has. Hopefully, it's a sign of better things to come for them (if for no other reason than to keep Google on their toes!).</p> <p>By the way, for those interested in the language stats project, I set up a <a href="http://forum.langpop.com/forums/1">forum</a> with RSS feeds, where I will be posting updates, and accepting suggestions for further improvements.</p> Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:29:00 -0800 urn:uuid:37220b7f-6c45-4bdc-95ed-cb30f4668350 David N. Welton http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/11/07/yui-compressor javascript http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/trackback/1819 <p>I've been working on a <a href="http://www.langpop.com">project</a> that uses graphics created with <a href="http://solutoire.com/plotr/">Plotr</a>, and I wanted to automate that from Rails, so I created <a href="http://chartr.rubyforge.org/">Chartr</a>. It's not very complete, but works well enough to create stuff like this:</p> <hr/> <p><script src="http://chartr.rubyforge.org/prototype1_5_1_1.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://chartr.rubyforge.org/excanvas.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://chartr.rubyforge.org/plotr_uncompressed.js" type="text/javascript"></script></p> <p><div class="chart"> <canvas id="results_chart" height="300" width="500"></canvas> </div></p> <script type="text/javascript"> var dataset = {"Number/Decade": [[0, 1000], [1, 5000], [2, 20000], [3, 22000]]}; var options = {colorScheme: "#22aa22", legend: {position: {}}, axis: {x: {ticks: [{label: "1960", v: 0}, {label: "1970", v: 1}, {label: "1980", v: 2}, {label: "1990", v: 3}]}}, padding: {left: 100}, background: {}, stroke: {}, legend: {position: {left: '120px'}}}; var discvar = new Plotr.BarChart("results_chart", options); discvar.addDataset(dataset); discvar.render(); </script> <hr/> <p>Help is more than welcome! I think the API is still a bit clumsy, more chart types need adding, and there are other things that could probably be improved, but it does work.</p> Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:15:00 -0700 urn:uuid:ff569c5f-e2ef-48ff-b50a-899b8fb4650f David N. Welton http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/30/chartr-plotr-generation-for-rails ruby rails javascript http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/trackback/1816