Building apps with D3.js

• Name : Nathan Vander Wilt
• Twitter : @natevw
• Github : natevw
• Website : http://exts.ch (rel=me) | http://n.exts.ch (blog)

Abstract

D3 is well-known as an SVG visualization library, but can provide a powerful platform for building entire DOM-aware frontend applications.

As Bret Victor's essay "Magic Ink" points out, most of software is visualization — by imagining your interface as an interactive chart, building an entire app with a DOM-based visualization library starts to make sense! Well-crafted code using D3 looks declarative, can be debugged imperatively, and lets you efficiently react to asynchronous or realtime updates. What's not to like?

This talk will defend using D3 for everything, show how to do it well, and explain what sort of architecture(s) can result. We'll look at how D3 combines what is right about jQuery with the architectural sanity of "capital-F frameworks" like Knockout/Angular/Ember, brilliantly offering the best of both worlds.

Speaker Bio

Nate is a freelance product developer and open/unhosted data addict, most recently busy combining RESTful sensor networks and smartwatches with suburban agriculture. His world headquarters are on the Eastern Washington steppe within a federally-sponsored pavement/McMansion oasis: this offers him and his family the joy of being weird, without the hassle of living abnormally.