I've just looked at dimple. It looks quite a bit simpler than implementing d3, I will have to play around with it, but from your experience how would you rate it in terms of ease of use, learning curve, performance, etc.?
- It is a lot simpler than D3
- It works best when your use case fits into the explicit examples given here : http://dimplejs.org/examples_index.html
- If you are wanting something from the advanced examples, you should be proficient in javascript and understand d3 already
- If you want something not in the examples at all, you should really understand d3.
It's pretty quick to get up and running with it, you can always get access to the underlying d3 selections to do more complicated operations, and the main developer is fairly accessible through stackoverflow questions or github questions. There are some gotchas I've run into but nothing that has made me consider switching. We evaluated a few different libraries before choosing it.
I can't speak for performance really because we don't have huge datasets. For ordinary business data (not looking at 1000s of points on a chart), it's fine.
Yeah, my experience exactly. It's a great start if you're prototyping and your initial use-cases map well to their demo pages. Once your designer gets excited, you'll have to write a lot of code on top of it and may well consider ditching it entirely.