Node.js chart rendering with C3 and Nightmare

I've been doing a lot of data analysis in JavaScript. It makes sense for me to work in JavaScript, because I already use it and that's where my visualizations normally end up. JavaScript has a very rich ecosystem of visualization libraries so that's not surprising. All these visualization libraries are browser based... which is great if that's where you want your visualization to be. It's not so great if you just want to render a chart to an image, say to store for later or to include in some kind of report.I wanted to be able to render charts from the command line. I wanted to be able to render charts from a headless server. There seems to be no charting or plotting library for JavaScript that supports this directly. We can however approach this indirectly and in my new blog post I'll show you how to render charts from Node.js. It's not as easy or convenient as we'd like but it is possible using a browser visualization library coupled with a headless browser.Please read the blog post to learn how to render charts and other visualizations using C3 and Nightmare.http://ift.tt/2Bngslz

Submitted December 23, 2017 at 12:53AM by ashleydavis75