new project: djedi

I have started a new project (yet another), pretty different from my usual programming languages: a framework for visualizing data in a browser. This framework is a Extract-Transform-Visualize tool, where data come from a database and are rendered by the browser.

Features

While some other project exist, I wanted to create a project with the following features:

simplicity: it provide objects (widgets) that you just place in your page as you want. It also provides dashboards to manage widgets, and in its simplest form you just give the name of a div element where a graph will be rendered.
modularity: every part of the project can be replaced easily by another component, either on the server-side (you only need an ajax server, not especially django) or the client-side (you can use javascript, svg, flash etc.)
interactive: interactions are important, to make the interface pretty, and also to navigate in data, or to enhance visualization. Most recent web toolkits allow a good number of interactions and animations (and most of them, without using flash)
working with big data sets: existing toolkits generally fail when dealing with big databases. Here, all requests are asynchronous and are designed to work on big tables
open source: Djedi is licensed under the Gnu General Public license version 3 (GPLv3) and is based on open-source libraries

Note that:

it does not required flash (only javascript, svg and css code for the moment), though writing flash plugins would be easy
it is not tied to django or python for the server
it is not tied to a Database (you can use any data source, be it a text file or a NoSQL DB)
it is currently tied to Dojo for the client-side, but only for the dashboard (not for the graphs). Using another dashboard implementation is possible (and maybe will be tested for jQuery).
it is not a security-only project, but more a generic-data-viz project

Targeted people include developers (to provide a quick way to add charts/data visualization to a page, add new custom widgets or render engines, etc.) and users (display and explore data, build custom dashboards).

See the details of the project on the Djedi Wiki page

Djedi

Project Status

Current work status is the following:

core functions are working (queries, transforms, display, etc.)
a working application is provided for ulogd2
writing documentation is in progress
current implementation for application ulogd2 use python and django for the server-side, and dojo for the client-side
working render engines include dojo, raphael, protovis, infovis, flotr and google maps

However:

it is still a framework (not a ready to deploy application)
you need to know django

Next objectives are to document how to write a new application, write a sample application for Snorby (which can be used to display Snort, Suricata and Sagan events).

Djedi

You can help !

Help would be appreciated, in many possible ways:

testing djedi
reporting bugs
looking at the documentation, and contributing if possible
adding feature requests
and, of course, contributing in the code, especially if you know javascript (I would love to see someone else writing the JS code, given how I like this language ..)

Project is managed using the Djedi Redmine page

If you want to test, contribute or are just curious join the #djedi channel on FreeNode

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animated charts in python and Qt
Date Sun 04 October 2009 Tags Programming Python Graphs Visualization

I’m currently trying to generated interactive (and animated) charts in Python + Qt. The wanted library would be:
- portable: this is one of the reasons of the choice of PyQt
- simple: same reason
- interactive: I want to be able to select, for example, the slices of a pie chart. A signal of events like Qt’s would be perfect
- animated: this is useless, but looking at things like AnyChart or FusionCharts, the result is really nice !
- light on dependencies: relying on tons of libs makes the project hard to maintain and not portable, especially for windows where there is not packaging and dependency system.
- free software
A quick search gave me the following products:
- matplotlib: mostly for scientific plots, but there is a nice number of options, a well-documented API.
- pyQwt: Python bindings for Qwt. Again, it’s more scientific plot than charts
- cairoplot: projects looks dead (or in the "yeah, the project’s not finished, but we’re recoding it in \$LANG to be faster" syndrome, which is more or less the same). It generates images, though item maps can be extracted. The name tells it, it uses Cairo.
- pyCha: some nice charts, uses Cairo. Very simple API (not …
read more

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