Flot

Flot 2.1.6 released - new maintainers!

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that our team at National Instruments has been given maintainer privileges to the flot charts github repository. We are looking forward to working with contributors to provide a simple, extensible, high-performance charting package. We have been maintaining a private fork of the flot repository since 2014. Very recently, we merged back our repository into the main flot repository. We took our time integrating these changes and put a high priority on maintaining compatibility whenever feasible. We were successful in many cases, but there are a handful of API changes and features updates. You can see more details in the changelog.

Part of this update to flot incorporated automated testing, builds, and a CI. Our goal is to ensure that the quality of the repository stays consistently high and that changes can be confidently integrated without having unintended consequences to functionality.

In addition, we have updated the way that flot is distributed. We now provide NPM packages for easier inclusion into projects and for easier update workflows.

Our intent is to start accepting pull requests from anyone who wants to contribute. We recognize that there is a significant backlog of pull requests outstanding and we hope to accept some of them along with new requests that are migrated to the new directory structure. Our priority is to accept fixes to known issues and changes that improve compatibility with existing usage. We put a high value on the quality of the project and expect that pull requests will pass tests and include testing for new functionality.

We welcome feedback and look forward to working with you to continue to improve this project.

Flot 0.8.3 released

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve released Flot 0.8.3, with fixes for jQuery compatibility, the resize plugin, axis labels, regressions from earlier 0.8.x releases, and more. You can download 0.8.3 here.

Important Bug Fixes in 0.8.3

Compatibility: Fixed compatibility issues with both older (pre-1.4.x) and newer (1.9.x and later) jQuery versions.

Resize plugin: Applied fixes to the the inline jQuery Resize plugin to address a regression that resulted in unexpectedly high CPU usage, as well as an error when using older versions of Internet Explorer.

Axes: Fixed regressions related to axis options and ticks, including bugs in the way space was reserved for the first and last tick labels.

See the NEWS file for a complete listing of changes made and bugs fixed.

Acknowledgments

We’d like to give special thanks to andig, btccointicker, dmfalke, EGLadona, Elite Gamer, jorese, Josh Pigford, Neil Katin, ngavard, Paolo Valleri, Phil Tsarik, soenter, tleish, and tommie for reporting issues or contributing fixes for this release.

Flot 0.8.2 released

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve released Flot 0.8.2, with patches for many new and long-standing bugs, including the remaining regressions introduced in 0.8. You can download 0.8.2 here.

Important Bug Fixes in 0.8.2

Tick Labels: Fixed several issues related to axis ticks, including bugs in the way widths were assigned to narrowly-spaced labels, and a change that broke the flot-tickrotor plugin.

Resize plugin: Updated the inline jQuery Resize plugin to the latest version, fixing several errors and a possible memory leak.

Rendering Glitches: Fixed a variety of rendering bugs, including white circles drawn over pie plots, bars not being filled-in on some browsers, and incorrectly-placed highlights when using right-aligned bars.

See the NEWS file for a complete listing of changes made and bugs fixed.

Acknowledgments

We’d like to give special thanks to Anthony Ryan, Benjamin Gram, BeWiBu, Brend Wanders, Brian Peiris, btccointicker, cleroux, Craig Oldford, Daniel Hoffmann Bernardes, Eric Byers, execjosh, irbian, Jack Klink, Luis Silva, Mark Cote, Matthew Sabol, melanker, Mihai Stanciu, Mike Połtyn, Munsifali Rashid, Patrik Ragnarsson, Pierre Dubois, ryleyb, sknob001, sloker, Teq1 and Thodoris Greasidis for reporting issues or contributing fixes for this release.

Flot 0.9 update

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Work on Flot 0.9 has been proceeding slowly but steadily. We’ve continued to clean up the codebase, and have been merging ‘on green’ (in terms of style) for several months now.

Thanks to work by Nick Schonning we now build using Grunt instead of Make. This does add a dependency on node.js, which we previously used only for JSHint, but it gives us flexibility to add things like automatic inlining of third-party dependencies.

Rotated text has been working in the 0.9-work branch for some time now; for example, here’s what the multi-axis example looks like with y-axis labels:

yaxes: [{
   label: "Price (USD)"
}, {
   alignTicksWithAxis: 1,
   position: "right",
   label: "USD/EUR exchange rate",
   labelPadding: 7
}]

</img>

Rotated tick labels still aren’t quite ready yet, but will be soon. The final step is to make this available to plugins, so instead of implementing custom HTML or canvas text you’ll be able to use a simple API from within hooks. The result will automatically render to either HTML or canvas, with styles, and looks almost pixel-identical, even when rotated, on browsers back to IE7.

Planning for 0.9

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This week we finished selecting the issues and features that we’ll work on for the 0.9 release. Below is a summary of the main goals, and you can take a look at the full list via the link above. Pay special attention to #9; we’re very interested in community feedback on the best way to implement this plugin mechanism.

Flot 0.9 Highlights

Clean up the code to the point where it passes our automated JSHint Travis build.

This is already done; you can check it out in the 0.9-work branch. Note that this involved removing inline plugins like jquery.colorhelpers.js, and we haven’t yet updated the build system to auto-inline these. We’ll handle that soon, but for now you’ll need to remember to include them yourself.
Core support for axis labels and plot titles.

This is in-progress, and should get pushed to 0.9-work in the next week.
Core support for basic rotated axis tick labels.
Factor out the built-in point, line, and bar draw types into plugins.

The plugins will still be inlined in jquery.flot.js, so this change won’t break any existing code.
Generalize and expose all functionality - defining hover/click areas, altering plot margins, etc. - that is currently restricted to the built-in plot types, making it available to any plugin.

The main goal of the 0.9 release is to improve and finalize the plugin API. Our biggest task is to pull out everything that is hard-coded into the built-in draw types and make it available to all plugins.
Extend hooks and events to give plugins additional capabilities.
Allow legends to be drawn to the canvas.

This will be optional, similar to how axis tick labels are drawn using HTML text by default, but can optionally be drawn to canvas.
Simplify exporting the plot to an image.

Image export questions come up all the time, and we should at least provide a good example for how to do it. We may even add helper functions to avoid some of the work.
Organize first-party and third-party plugins, and allow inlining of dependencies.

Since Flot first introduced its plugin API, there has been a big expansion in the number of core and third-party plugins, and we need a better way to organize them all. We also need to figure out how plugins get accepted into the core repository, and what that means in terms of who maintains them.

There are still a lot of open questions here, so we’ve created a new forum topic to discuss the problem, and get feedback on some ideas for how to solve it.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing to Flot, check out the 0.9 milestone’s list of open issues. Remember to start your work from the 0.9-work branch, and first discuss any larger changes in the issue before implementing them.

A new branching scheme

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week’s release of 0.8.1 was Flot’s first-ever point-release. One of the reasons why we haven’t had them in the past is because our branching scheme didn’t support it.

Before 0.8, every pull request and fix was merged straight into master, making it always the latest version of the library. This was easy to understand, but prevented us from releasing minor fixes separate from major changes that we knew were incomplete or still needed more testing.

</img>

You may have already noticed that after the release of 0.8 we added a couple of new branches: 0.9-work and code-cleanup. Now master represents the stable release - currently 0.8.2 - while new features and major releases are given separate branches. Feature branches are merged into the next major-release branch on completion, and when the release is ready it is merged into master.

All this time, we can continue merging minor fixes into master. This lets us ship point-releases to get those changes out to you faster, so you don’t have to wait until the next major-release to use them safely in production.

After every point-release we merge back into the next major-release branch, to keep it up-to-date as work continues.

This is great for users, but it does mean that those of you contributing pull requests need to do a little more to ensure that you’re working from the correct branch. If your contribution is anything beyond a bug fix - if it adds a feature or changes the API in any way - then you should base against the 0.9-work branch.

As always, please try to follow Flot’s contribution guidelines. We will soon begin requiring that new code pass our automated JSHint before we’ll merge it. It’s just a good idea in general; it makes the merge easy for us so we have more time to work on new features for you.

Flot 0.8.1 released

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve released Flot 0.8.1, with patches for regressions introduced in 0.8 and other fixes that either couldn’t make it into 0.8 or were reported later. You can download 0.8.1 here.

Important Bug Fixes in 0.8.1

Axis labels: Fixed several axis labeling issues, including regressions in 0.8 that changed the way dates were aligned, caused duplicate axis labels to disappear, and prevented label text from wrapping.

Pie plugin: Resolved a regression in 0.8 that broke pie charts if their data was provided in [[x, y]] format.

jQuery compatibility: Worked around a regression in 0.8 that broke compatibility with jQuery versions earlier than 1.7.

Axis scaling: Fixed a bug in the implementation of the series ‘zero’ option that caused it to be ignored for series with nulls in their data.

See the NEWS file for a complete listing of changes made and bugs fixed.

Acknowledgments

We’d like to give special thanks to Brian Peiris, Daniel Rothig, Daniel Shapiro, goorpy, Lee Willis, Marcelo Jorge Vieira, Mark Raymond, Michal Zglinski, Nicolas Morel, Paolo Valleri, sabregreen, Tom Sheppard, and vird for contributing fixes or reporting issues fixed in this release.

Flot 0.8 is live!

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce the release of Flot 0.8! Two years in the making, it includes more than a hundred new features and bug fixes from more than fifty contributors. Download the new version and enjoy!

What’s New in 0.8?

Time series improvements: Support for time series has been moved into a plugin, jquery.flot.time.js, and a new axis option “timezone” controls the time zone in which dates are displayed.

Canvas text: A new plugin, jquery.flot.canvas.js, renders axis tick labels directly to the canvas, rather than using HTML elements, making it much easier to save entire plots as images.

Plotting categories: The new categories plugin makes it easy to plot data that is grouped into text categories rather than numeric axis values.

Plotting error bars: The new error bars plugin can be used to show standard deviation and other useful statistical properties.

Support for high-resolution displays: Flot now looks even crisper on the high-density displays found in many new phones, tablets, and laptops.

Lots of bug fixes: We’ve fixed over a hundred bugs, resolving long-standing issues with the pie plugin and cross-browser compatibility, among many others.

Many other enhancements: We’ve added everything from improved control over the grid’s appearance to legend sorting to thresholding improvements.

See the NEWS file for a complete listing of changes made and bugs fixed.

Acknowledgments

Flot 0.8 has received more community contributions than any previous version. We’d like to give special thanks to the YCharts team for sponsoring the canvas text project, and to aaa707, Adam Mckaig, alanayoub, Alexander Blunck, Alexander O. Anisimov, Anthony Ryan, Ara Anjargolian, Arnaud Bellec, Arpan, Bevan, Brian Peiris, chage, Christopher Lambert, Clemens Stolle, dalton, Daniel Shapiro, Eddie Kay, Eric Wendelin, gcruxifix, hizhengfu, Hongli Lai, Ivan Novikov, James Ward, Jamie Hamel-Smith, Julien Thomas, Jürgen Marsch, kaarlenkaski, Karl Swedberg, Knut Forkalsrud, Lasse Dahl Ebert, Lau Bech Lauritzen, maimairel, martinqt, Michael Mayer, Nate Abele, Nick Campbell, Olivier Guerriat, Ralph Holzmann, risicle, Rui Pereira, Ruth Linehan, Sean Jordan, Sergiy Borodych, Simon Strandgaard, Shad Downey, Shane Reustle, Steve Robinson, thecountofzero, Tom Cleaveland, Yael Elmatad, and the many others who reported bugs, suggested features, and answered questions on the forums!

Announcing Flot 0.8 beta

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce that Flot 0.8 has entered beta! It has been almost two full years since the release of version 0.7, and we’re very happy to see all the new stuff that we’ve been working on finally move towards a major release!

To the Flot community: thank you so very much for your support and the enormous number of bug reports, feature suggestions, and pull requests that you’ve contributed towards this release.

Now grab a copy and start testing it!

What’s New?

Time series improvements: Support for time series has been moved into a plugin, jquery.flot.time.js, and a new axis option “timezone” can be used to control the time zone in which the dates are displayed.

Canvas text: A new plugin, jquery.flot.canvas.js, allows axis tick labels to be rendered directly to the canvas, rather than using HTML elements, making it much easier to save entire plots as images.

Plotting categories: The new categories plugin makes it easy to plot data that is grouped into text categories rather than numeric axis values.

Plotting error bars: The new error bars plugin can be used to show standard deviation and other useful statistical properties.

Support for high-resolution displays: Flot now looks even crisper on the high-density displays found in many new phones, tablets, and laptops.

Tons of bug fixes: We’ve fixed over a hundred bugs, resolving long-standing issues with the pie plugin and cross-browser compatibility, among many others.

Lots of enhancements: We’ve added and merged a huge number of enhancements, covering everything from improved control over the grid’s appearance to legend sorting to thresholding improvements.

See the NEWS file for a complete listing of changes made and bugs fixed.

What to Test

The long development cycle for this release means that many of its changes are already quite stable, but we still need your help to ensure that the 0.8 final release is as solid as possible.

We’d especially appreciate testing of canvas-text across a wide-range of browsers, platforms, and font options. Another great testing target is the new time-series plugin, including timezones and date/time formatting options.

The long road to canvas text

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After several delays, canvas text support in 0.8 is finally nearing completion!

For those of you who haven’t been following along, Flot has historically used HTML divs to render axis labels and other text. One of the major projects for the 0.8 release, sponsored by YCharts, was a switch to rendering text directly onto the canvas. This offered better performance and made it possible to save an entire plot (minus the legend) to an image.

But it turned out that many users had come to rely on HTML text, and it has advantages of its own, including the ability to embed mark-up, better styling, straightforward interactivity via jQuery events, and more reliable metrics and render quality.

So we needed a way to make both sides happy. Our solution was to revert to HTML text as the default, while making it very simple to re-render the plot with canvas text at any time. The implementation took a while to evolve - see pull request #935 - but has stabilized enough that we’ll be able to merge it into master very soon.

To enable drawing to canvas, one need only include the jquery.flot.canvas.js plugin, then enable it like this:

$.plot("#placeholder", series, {
	canvas: true
})

This works even if you’re using CSS to style your text; the plugin will create a dummy element and extract its text styles. Our goal is for the transition to be seamless; you should be able to create an interactive plot using HTML text, then toggle canvas rendering to save it as an image, and not see a difference. This is demonstrated in the image below:

</img>

The multiple-axes example, with the left half using HTML text and the right half using canvas text.

The only difference is that canvas text is shifted down by a pixel, and even that should be resolved in time for the 0.8 release.

This is all backed by our new text API, which will make it easy for us to add features like axis labels to the core in subsequent releases. It’s currently for internal use only, but we plan to open it to plugins as soon as possible.

Looking further ahead, the canvas plugin isn’t restricted to axis labels; adding the ability to render the legend to canvas is the next logical step.