Differences between v 0.2.0 and prior version

[Bryan]

I worked with cube a few months ago and have had reason to come back
to it. I decided to update to the latest version and noticed what
seems to be a non-trivial difference between the two in terms of what
the evaluator UI looks like.

Previously, when going to '/' on the evaluator, I'd get the ability to
create visualizations in the UI. Now, it seems to come with some pre-
built visualizations.

We were mostly planning on using the metric APIs for our actual needs,
but it was nice to have the ability to create ad hoc visualizations
just to sanity check the expressions we were passing in the API calls.
Is there still a way to create these visualizations via the UI or is
the suggested route just using D3 to implement them?

I assume the latter. If that's correct, out of curiosity, do you mind
sharing what your motivation was for moving away from providing the
GUI-based visualization creation? It wasn't a must have feature, but
it was nice.

Thanks... Bryan

[Itay Neeman]

Things are based on Cubism now (square.github.com/cubism). You can easily use Cubism to create your UI (and this is what the default UI on Cube uses now). You can keep using the same query language that you did before.

Hopefully this makes some sense :)

Itay

[Mike Bostock]

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for the question. There are a lot of reasons why we switched
from a graphical user interface (Cube 0.1) to an application
programming interface (Cubism 1.0). The big one is that an API has a
much higher power-to-weight ratio: we can enable more expressive
dashboards more easily with a simple library than we can trying to
develop a comprehensive GUI.

Cubism.js provides a small set of orthogonal components (metrics,
charts, stylesheets, etc.) that are assembled via code. Cubism's
charts are much improved over those previously built-in to Cube, and
they are also much easier to customize and extend. You can define new
chart types, new stylesheets, new forms of interaction, combine cubism
charts with other HTML, etc.

You can still implement a graphical constructor on top of Cube +
Cubism, if you like. Or you could use a wiki to let people edit static
files that embed Cubism charts. Perhaps we'll release an example of
this in the future.

Mike

[Bryan]

Thanks. That all makes sense. I appreciate the response.

[Antoine Meausoone]

Hi, 

This kind of solution (wiki) seems very interesting. Do you have an example of such solution ? 

I thought trying this solution with xwiki, but did you use another wiki engine, and in this case which one ?   

Thank you, 

Antoine