Extending cube

[John Krueger]

I've been exploring cube for a couple days now. Let me preface by
saying it's awesome. I love how easy it was to get things hooked up
and eating test data.

I'm wondering if being able to manipulate the x axis of a chart is
worth trying to add. I would really like to be able to look at some
information that isn't shown over time.

Is this feasible, or does it go against the purpose of cube?

Can anyone suggest where I could start in the code to add this type of
functionality?

If this sounds ridiculous, is there another library that would offer
what I'm looking for?

[John Krueger]

To clarify what I was trying to say before, I want to be able to do
comparison bar graphs.

Obviously, d3 is the best tool I've seen for doing this. I think what
I'll look into doing is making some custom pieces that utilize the
grammar that's already there.

I don't want time to be an interval, but I am going to need to be able
to select a range to pull from, then select what I want to compare
from that. I want this in addition to what cube gives. If anybody is
doing anything like this, let me know.

[Mike Bostock]

My plan for March is to spend some time working on an interactive
time-series chart library (or some reusable visualization component
library, perhaps not strictly chart-based); this would be a
higher-level abstraction on top of D3, but still programmable. It
would be something in between Cube's strictly-graphical interface,
which is easy to use but extremely limited, and using D3 directly,
which is flexible but requires more effort.

I've written up a strawman convention for charts here:

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/chart/

Once that library is in place, we could retrofit it to Cube's
dashboard builder so as to still allow graphical construction of
dashboards. But you'd also have a nice, small library available that
you could use from HTML & JavaScript that would give you much greater
control over chart appearance, interaction, and layout.

Mike