ECharts is an open source, Web-based, cross-platform framework that supports rapid creation of interactive visualizations. It is easy to use, has rich built-in interactions, and has high performance. ECharts customizes built-in chart types through a declarative visual design language, and the underlying streaming architecture and high-performance graphic renderers greatly improve the extensibility and performance of ECharts.
In the second phase of VI 2018, a research paper ECharts, which is cooperated by Baidu ECharts team and CAD&CG Key Laboratory of Zhejiang University, was admitted in advance: A Declarative Framework for Rapid Construction of Web-based Visualization (LI De-qing, MEI Hong-hui, SHEN Yi, SU Shuang, ZHANG Wen-Li, WANG Jun-ting, ZU Ming, Chen Wei). Background: Due to the lack of programming ability of users in visual analysis and design to quickly create web-based visual works will still encounter many difficulties, and the existing visual design system and programming tool library can not solve this problem well. This article introduces ECharts, an open source, Web-based, cross-platform framework that supports rapid creation of interactive visualizations. It is easy to use, has rich built-in interactions and high performance. The results show that by comparing the practicability and performance of ECharts with c3. js, HighCharts and chart.js, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the framework.
Part of built-in chart
ECharts architecture design
ECharts two-dimensional and three-dimensional visualization, except the underlying rendering engine is different, the upper architecture and workflow are the same. The simple architecture, as shown below, consists of a ZRender layer and an ECharts layer. The main function of the ZRender layer is to Isolation of the underlying rendering engine, encapsulation of basic rendering elements and rendering features supported by the rendering engine, and encapsulation of basic user interactions such as Mouse events and graphic animations.
The ECharts layer contains concrete visualizations, components, interactions between views, and interfaces that external programs can call. The visual view here refers to the specific visual representation of the line chart and scatter chart; Components are tools that assist the view in drawing and presenting data, such as coordinate systems and toolboxes; View interactions refer to specific interactions on individual views, such as drill-up and drill-down on bar charts. The external interface is mainly used for external programs to control ECharts program rendering and interaction. The views and components within ECharts are independent of each other and can be arbitrarily combined for easy extension and maintenance.
Detailed architecture
Progressive rendering
ECharts influence
ECharts has a huge impact on domestic industry. It currently ranks second in GitHub’s visualization section, with 27762 stars as of this writing. With a daily Baidu index of nearly 8K, a daily PV of 350K on the official website and about 9W active users per week, it is the most popular visualization tool in China at present. It not only provides visualization support for nearly 90% of Baidu’s internal product lines, but also is widely used by external organizations such as The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Bureau of Statistics, National Patent Office, Huawei, Lenovo, Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, Xiaomi, Toutiao and so on. Through incomplete statistics, currently occupy 70% of the domestic market share.
The paper, the original link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468502X18300068
Visual Informatics (Chinese name: Visual Informatics) is an international open access academic journal sponsored by Zhejiang University, jointly published by Zhejiang University Press and Elsevier Publishing Group. The journal focuses on modeling, analyzing, synthesizing, and enhancing the interaction with nature of visual information for human perception. The chief editors are Professor Zhou Kun and Professor Hans-Peter Seidel.