Hey everyone - I wanted to draw everybody's attention to plotly. This morning I read about https://plot.ly/ in the Perl Weekly. plotly is a 2D plotting library with some distinctive features that we've not seen in PDL plotting. I received an email from one of the co-founders requesting a review, so I decided to take a look and pass along what I found.
plotly is a cloud-based web service with a REST API. You (usually) transmit your data to the plotly servers and they handle all of the rendering. Alternatively, they provide means to access data on your own cloud storage like Amazon S3. Either way, plotly makes it really easy to share data with distant collaborators. It is also means that plotly is trans-language. They have API bindings for Perl, obviously, but also Matlab, Python, R, and Julia. They even have an API to stream data directly to their servers from an Arduino device. Plots need not be public, and data need not be stored on plotly's servers. Plots can be exported to PNG, SVG, PDF, and EPS. Obviously this is not as flexible as Gnuplot and does not support interaction the way that Prima does. As far as I can tell, they do not charge for this service, but it requires an internet connection. In all, it looks to me like it's not a bad library, and it beats sending powerpoint slides or a collection of image figure files. It is also (presently) much easier than writing your own web app. (That said, if Joel decides he'd like to write a Mojolicious-based App::ShareMyData, we'd have a credible competitor, I'd say. :-) I plan on taking this for a spin some time. I plan on using this to share some data with a collaborator. I also want to try it out and see if there are aspects that I would like to borrow for PDL::Graphics::Prima. Enjoy! David -- "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
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