Example for the wiki

[Christopher Meier]

Gordon,

I've been working on a visualization slide package called SLIDcES (pronounced 'slides'). Although it isn't nearly completely, and is very under-documented, I was wondering if you would consider listing it on the examples section of the wiki?

The technical purpose of it is to prove out and assess, through this prototype, that one can interactively create a 'DC' page, and maintain some business intelligence type displays, without coding. In the 'editor', one can select some data (say a CSV file, or json URL), then in a WYSIWYG fashion add charts, tables, etc to show on a page, without any javascript/html coding. One target is non-coder business users, that have been using Excel to chart and explore data or 'publish' reports, who end up caught up in Excel's 'maintenance' issues when trying to add more data or 'dig in' (manual filtering). Or those (such as engineers) who just want a quick look into their data without having to fire up Mathematica, R, etc.

It is not limited to just 'one page', rather a page can contain a set of 'slides' -- presently the visual cue/GUI is the set of buttons at the top of a multiple-slide equipped 'page', which includes fwd (>) and back (<) buttons. To date it has been limited to one Table per slide page, however it can now use more than one set of data at once in a single slide (each, if displayed in a chart or Table, is in a separate Chart Group). Also, a slide set can either be 'published' as an html page (that opens and 'runs' a slide set), or, one can directly open a 'SLIDcES' set file or link from an existing page, without navigating html pages and reloading js (its quicker that way). This latter functionality is demonstrated at the SLIDcES.html link below, look under the column 'SLIDcES_Link' in the table. Aggregation of slide 'components' and 'data sources' is supported, but not yet in the editor.

The js files currently include a pre-1.7.0 dc.js version (I'm calling it 1.6.99, from Spring this year). Eventually I'll test it out with 2.0, once 2.0 fixes have settle down. Since development is on-going, the publicly available js files will change fairly often.

One of my clients is using this for 'Business Intelligence'/visualization. For example, we just implemented a KPI where defective material rates (on parts) are normalized to product shipment rate, on a quarterly basis. It is also used to show/explore part/subsystem/system measurement/calibration population and run chart data for 'product'. And 'dashboards' of various things, like sales application studies, manufacturing escalations, service installations, and such. The development roadmap to date has been 'tailored' to meet their needs, using an agile/sprints approach, rather than trying to achieve pure goals for example "all DC.js chart types and functionality supported before a 'release' ". Since I've been the primary developer and slide author to date, the documentation on using the editor is lacking, but will be addressed shortly.

I recently added some jQueryUI and bootstrap to be able to adjust/control layout, and that needs some improvement yet. The roadmap includes eventual better separation of functional layers (slides, html/layouts, DC).

A (too) short description is at http://the12Lab.com/SLIDcES/ (a blog posting link), and that contains a link to the top level slide set of examples and tests, which is at http://the12Lab.com/SLIDcES.html (a DC equipped SLIDcES web page). There is also an Android App that displays the SLIDcES.html example 'site' in a contained webkit browser, at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.the12Lab.wvd.SLIDcES.

-Chris