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So I have been having lots of fun playing with SIMILE Timeline, but unfortunately, it appears to be all but abandoned (most recently closed ticket May 2009) and riddled with memory leaks, especially when you are dynamically loading and unloading events (which is especially true in my case).

I am a novice in JavaScript, so debugging these leaks is going to be more than a little complicated. Before I dive head-first into fixing a problem in a language I don't understand or a codebase I have never looked at, I want to know if there is anything out there that compares to the feature-set that I can get with Timeline:

  1. Multiple events on one band
    • instead of having 10, 100, 1000 rows of data, use the space available to fit multiple events on one line when possible
  2. Scrollable
  3. CSS styling down to the specific event
    • I can specify a specific icon, font, etc., for each event if I need to. This is great for highlighting error events or interesting events
  4. filtering/searching/highlighting
  5. highlighting a band of time or point in time
    • This would be a vertical band that shows a 'now' moment, or a band that covers a time period's start and end time

I know that alot of these features can probably be put into things such as Flot or HighCharts, but these things were next to free for me to use in Timeline, so I'm weighing the cost/benefit of whether it is easier to fix a memory leak or roll out 3 - 4 features on some library that doesn't have it. My gut says "fix the leak, it's easier", but I would like to know if anyone can show me something that might be 90% of the way there with a low barrier of entry to getting that other 10%.

Nick Klauer
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    I have also worked with Simile Timeline (see http://innl.nl) and and I found it a nightmare. Almost no documentation and often outdated documentation, outdated/undocumented code, lots of browser bugs. -- It's not just problems with memory leakage. But yes, it's the only open source thing out there and it is extendable. – Blaise Mar 19 '11 at 19:04
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    I'm offering a bounty, even though I think timeglider is already a *brilliant* answer to this question, because I have a personal interest in this question and I'd like to see somebody get a nice rep bonus for answering it. – Mu Mind May 05 '11 at 20:10
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    I'm glad I ran across this question, I'm just starting with SIMILE timeline and was finding it a huge pain too, I can now predictably crash firefox with it! – Brian Feb 25 '12 at 18:29
  • is Anyone had tried with this widget in HTTPS ?? – joshua Oct 09 '12 at 11:52
  • Been using it over HTTPS for a few years, no specific issues relating to that I'm aware of. – philw Jan 23 '13 at 15:56
  • look at http://time.graphics – Jenkamen Mar 01 '17 at 09:14

8 Answers8

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Maybe you can use the Timeline from the (open source) CHAP Links Library, developed by Almende.

http://almende.github.com/chap-links-library/timeline.html

Have a look at the examples to see what you can do with the Timeline. It is quite flexible, you can choose your create your own layout and use your own CSS/HTML in each individual event.

Jos de Jong
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    +1 for an excellent link, I would +2 if I could! Anyone looking for a JavaScript timeline should consider this. I've worked with Simile and Timeglider before and always found that I was having to battle with some of the code. Timeline on the other hand appears to be very comprehensive. If you have used it, what were your experiences with it? – andyb Jan 04 '12 at 11:47
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    +1 Looks great .. definitely going to consider it as a Simile replacement – codeinthehole Jan 11 '12 at 16:34
  • If you can use the same e-mail / openid on both accounts, we'll be happy to merge. – Tim Post Jun 11 '12 at 08:39
  • What an amazing perfect library indeed. light weight and fully customizable. +1 for this link – Narayan Singh Mar 27 '13 at 14:13
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    This should be the accepted answer, can't believe people pay money to Timeglider when this one is available for free. – Samara Apr 26 '13 at 12:36
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    CHAP Links Library now has a successor: [vis.js](http://visjs.org/). Consider using that instead. – Austin Moore Jun 24 '14 at 18:13
  • +1 - this is by far the best solution yet, which also works in IE8! The successor http://visjs.org/ is also great, but does not work in IE8. – xited Jul 09 '14 at 01:50
  • Why is this not at the top?! I am flabbergasted, as it's perfect for the question. – Zoran Pavlovic Sep 12 '14 at 10:57
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Check out Timeglider (see http://timeglider.com/jquery/) which is an open source (MIT), JavaScript (uses jQuery) scrolling timeline under active development. It meets your first 4 requirements I believe but I am unclear about the specifics of your 5th requirement. I have only done some simple experiments with Timeglider and don't know it very well but maybe this is a potential solution for you.

Matthew Sielski
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    Not my question, but I gave you an upvote. Thanks for the simile alternative! – Brian O'Dell May 05 '11 at 20:06
  • The 5th requirement can be seen in that picture above with the orange band. I've more-or-less used it to highlight a small 10px band that says "this is the current time", and then every minute or so, I move the band and the highlight to the new time. It recenters, too. That being said, this seems pretty awesome, and I would rather give up that feature if it meant a snappy doesn't-crash-your-browser experience. I'll definitely have to give this a go. – Nick Klauer May 05 '11 at 20:21
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    It's no longer under MIT licence unfortunately. – Alex Korban May 30 '12 at 22:07
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    That is unfortunate. Not much consolation, but I believe versions prior to the license change ([here and earlier](https://github.com/timeglider/jquery_widget/tree/345442fa3dc7c66b23c36031a6569693ecf309bd)) remain MIT licensed. – Matthew Sielski May 31 '12 at 20:55
  • look at http://time.graphics its better – Jenkamen Mar 01 '17 at 09:15
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We needed the Simile Timeline at Lab 21k so we took the source code, cleaned it up and published it using bower. So you don't need an alternative anymore.

https://github.com/Lab21k/standalone-timeline/

Felipe de Morais
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The Timeline project is very much alive, they just don't use Google Code anymore. The Simile widgets are now hosted on a dedicated homepage, here is the homepage and documentation of Timeline. Keep in mind that the links on the page are not consistent, many pages still link to the outdated wikis on Google Code and the mit.edu wiki pages. Keep that in mind when checking the wiki.

There is also an active mailing list on Google Groups.

Michael
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  • Where's the source code hosted? Google Code shows the last commit sometime in mid-2009, so if they have a new repo, then maybe the issues I had before (memory leaks, somewhat kludgy API) would be fixed... – Nick Klauer May 27 '11 at 20:07
  • In looking at their new site, it doesn't appear that they are using GoogleCode for **documentation**, but they still link to their downloads and examples on googlecode.com, so I think my original statement (Timeline's code hasn't been updated since 2009) still holds true. – Nick Klauer Sep 08 '11 at 01:32
  • It looks like they're updating their code again - most recent closed issue was July 2011, most recent [change](http://code.google.com/p/simile-widgets/source/list) September 7 2011. – aeosynth Sep 12 '11 at 06:37
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    I was just looking at this the other day. Those recent commits are for the other SIMILE widgets, not the timeline one. – Brian Feb 25 '12 at 19:17
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    From the Simile tag wiki itself: "As of Spring 2012, Exhibit is the only Simile widget seeing active development." So, the TimeLine control has not been updated since 2009. – Miika L. May 18 '12 at 12:12
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This is probably the best one around right now:

http://timeline.verite.co/

Sandro Pasquali
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    I don't know if you read the question or saw how I'm using it. Yes, I'll say that Timeline JS is pretty, but it's completely outside of how I need to use it and lacks almost any customizations outside of css styling. And one part of it that makes it almost useless from the [FAQ](http://timeline.verite.co/#faq-04): – Nick Klauer Sep 21 '12 at 14:12
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    and the part that says that it shouldn't handle more than 100 elements, of which I would have several hundred. "Timeline is optimized for up to 100 entries preferably more like 20-30. Anything else may cause a loading issue." So while it'd be nice, it's unfortunately a no-go, even by their standards. – Nick Klauer Oct 09 '12 at 22:22
  • I found this link useful, so I redeemed it with an upvote. Thank you! – Khalid Abuhakmeh Nov 21 '12 at 19:57
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I'm actually working with the Simile Timeline in a project of my called Event Viewpoint. I've fixed quite a lot of bugs and enhanced it with many contributions that I have found online including images for the event, a zoom bar, and some additional events.

It is a brilliant piece of work just needs someone to take the time to update it and make it more current. That is currently out of scope for my project, but if I have time in the next year or so I will start to enhance it.

It would really be great if people could revive the project, add touch events and so on.

If someone needs the source I am willing to provide it.

Luisz Bobirca
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  • Perhaps use a fork of https://github.com/simile-widgets/timeline to share these improvements with the world? – mdxs Dec 08 '14 at 11:50
  • When I get farther along I will, right now I'm still trying to get my features into it. I'm fiddling with adding a Zoom bar like Google Maps. I have updated it with latest version of JQuery and have a Grunt build task to build it. – Luisz Bobirca Jan 22 '15 at 18:26
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They’re still very active. David Karger makes frequent updates. Now they have the version 3.0. You can find reference documentation here: http://simile-widgets.org/wiki/Reference_Documentation_for_Exhibit.

The code is here: https://github.com/simile-widgets/exhibit

Wilson Rodrigues
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I don't know exactly what you want, but i'm working on this jquery plugin that it's being used in a website with dynamically managed events.

JuanMa Agüero
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