[epgui]

What you need is a system that implements some Grammar of Graphics (Leland Wilkinson, 2000; sometimes abbreviated "GoG" or "GG"), like ggplot2, vega, or something like that. Although I'm a bit weary of systems that have "their own version" of Wilkinson's GoG but that don't necessarily have the same rigorous correctness proofs.

D3 is awesome but not trivial: I consider it a more low-level tool than any GoG.

[PaulHoule]

no fan of ggplot2, one of the few ‘higher level’ libs i do like is seaborne as it has some actual wisdom baked in.

i think one d3.js succeeds so well because it treats scales as functions, which is what they really are. as such it gives you the tools to implement ‘grammar of graphics’. Also it is giving you full control of the attributes of svg and other objects and puts them at the service of the GoG viewpoint as opposed to offering you declarative access to an impoverished and inevitably flawed toolbox.

[epgui]

Yeah, even though GoG was designed and is usually (or always? is there a counter-example?) implemented with the OOP paradigm, I've always found that its principles were better abstracted with functions and combinators. It's a product of its time.

I believe the original GoG theory/specification does not suffer from the same impoverishment and flaws, it having been formally proven and all... But the same cannot be said of any particular implementation "merely inspired by it". I would very much like to implement it in a pure FP language like haskell (and/or perhaps even proven correct with Coq) some day, that would be fun.

Myself, I think ggplot2 is one of the more solid and least-crippled implementations. Unfortunately, my distaste for the R language is such that I hope I never have to use it again.