Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mbostock 856 days ago
Yes! It first felt counterintuitive and constraining to prepare data ahead of time, rather than just loading whatever you want on the fly. But we’ve found this to be a great discipline in practice because it forces you to think about what data you actually need to show, and to shift as much of the compute to build time to reduce file sizes (through aggregation and filtering) and accelerate page load. And once you become accustomed to instant dashboards it becomes unthinkable to go back to slow queries.
2 comments

I think the idea of Framework is really good, but static data limits the applications, excluding monitoring and other cases in which the data is constantly changing, but the dashboard can stay as it is. For example, I'd love to see a revamped Framework version of the LHC beam monitor and related pages (see https://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/vistar/, but check again in 2 months or so, when the accelerator will be running).

In high-energy physics, ROOT is /the/ toolkit for data analysis, and I guess jsROOT (https://root.cern.ch/js/) could also be used to load data to be shown in Framework dashboards. I thought the idea of Framework as a blogging engine with powerful data visualization built-in could be very interesting. Think, for example, about physicists pulling open data (https://opendata.cern.ch) and writing about their analysis or someone pulling data from https://ourworldindata.org/ in their own visualizations to support their case while writing about a particular subject, etc.

Realistically what's the biggest you can make the dataset if you need to prebuild everything? Aggregation and filtering help, but quickly become impractical if you want people to change the filters dynamically.