Support flexible plotting

[domoritz]

It would be great if danfo was agnostic to a particular plotting library and supported for example Vega-Lite and in particular https://github.com/vega/vega-lite-api.

[risenW]

Hi @domoritz thanks for the feedback. We would definitely love to support other plotting libraries, but we had to bundle danfo with one for a start. We can definitely create wrappers that works with different backends going forward.

[domoritz]

Sounds great. Just wondering, why do you think danfo needs to be bundled with a plotting library. Wouldn't it be better to keep the dependencies lean and provide plotting as an extension? Instead of making .plot a function of a dataframe, you could even turn it around and plat(df). I can see that you want to stay close to Pandas but in js dependencies are a lot more expensive than in Python since you usually have to load the complete dependencies every time you run the code.

Either way, I'm super excited about danafo! We have previously built https://github.com/vega/datalib but did all the data munging in js.

[risenW]

I totally get your point, what I think we can do is remove the plotting dependency and have users require it instead. Or we can create a more generic plotting module that can work with numerous plotting packages as you have earlier mentioned.
We can definitely redesign this if you're interested in working with us on it.

[willium]

+1 on not bundling a plotting library. Doesn't seem germane to the problems that this attempts to solve (dataframes).

[domoritz]

I think unbundling plotting is probably the best approach as there are many js plotting libraries and it's not clear which one makes the most sense in a particular use case.

[Alex-Monahan]

Plotly is actually perfect for me, and I love having a .plot method on your DataFrame object! Please don't remove that capability, or please show me a path to re-import it! :-)

[domoritz]

The plotting library could extend danafo or you could call plot(dataFrame, ...) where you call dataFrame.plot(...) today.

[steveoni]

The plotting library could extend danafo or you could call plot(dataFrame, ...) where you call dataFrame.plot(...) today.

I totally agree with that. We can try creating a wrapper for some of the popular plotting libaries

[risenW]

Plotly is actually perfect for me, and I love having a .plot method on your DataFrame object! Please don't remove that capability, or please show me a path to re-import it! :-)

Sure we won't remove support for it, we will just not bundle it together to reduce size, and then create a wrapped for it. This ensures we can create separate wrappers for different plotting package.

So we can do something similar to Plot(dataframe, Plotly) or Plot(dataframe, Vega)