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Here is my problem:

I have a bunch of 2D points in a data file on the web server, I would like to transfer the points from the server to the client browser and displayed on his browser. The user needs to have options to zoom(in/out), pan(drag) and select regions of the points on the 2d data canvas.

W.R.T. the scenario above, what is the best way to implement? Can I use javascript + ajax or use java applet? Can I improve the performance by transforming the data points into images and then do the image manipulation instead?

Thanks! Shumin

Shumin Guo
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  • You say "his" browser, if the client is specific; do you (or can you) have control over what browser they will use to view it? – Orbling Sep 18 '12 at 21:19
  • No,I don't know what the browser might use, so let's just consider some generic browsers like firefox or chrome on PC. – Shumin Guo Sep 18 '12 at 21:22

2 Answers2

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I'd use HTML5 and canvas or just a good JavaScript graphing library.

Java applets are 1995 technology. Who cares about dancing teapots anymore?

duffymo
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    nice - but still many people do not have browsers that are HTML5 capable. – Randy Sep 18 '12 at 21:16
  • Javascript graphing libraries are quite good, even without HTML5 and canvas. – duffymo Sep 18 '12 at 21:20
  • Easy to find out who supports HTML5: http://html5test.com/ – duffymo Sep 18 '12 at 21:21
  • @duffymo: Asked the OP if he can guarantee the browser; answer was no, so I imagine it needs to work across the board as is normally the case. – Orbling Sep 18 '12 at 21:26
  • I find [this thread](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/119969/javascript-chart-library) talking about the javascript graphing library. It looks good, but my another concern is that usually my data on the server is very large, which if loaded all at once might make the browser very slow. So are there any optimization techniques for large dataset visualization? Such as the one I mentioned to transform the data points into a image before doing manipulations? – Shumin Guo Sep 18 '12 at 21:27
  • You're going to have that problem regardless of what display technology you choose. You'll have to trade off what you'll present to users. Do they want a million data points, or just a good least squares fit representation the best line you can create? – duffymo Sep 18 '12 at 22:20
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There are lists of data visualization tools at http://datavisualization.ch/tools/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_visualization . If you are interested in data and , http://reddit.com/r/visualization, http://flowingdata.com/ , and http://visual.ly/ are great resources. Edward Tufte. http://dygraphs.com/ and http://square.github.com/cubism/ [ http://d3js.org/ ] look great. There are a lot of cool data visualizations listed in the D3JS Gallery: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery . For example, the http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111116/iris-splom.html example shows 2D data with extra categorical dimensions.

Wes Turner
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