6 ms·

Perspective: Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI

328 points by texodus 3y ago

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
why are web apps always so janky. no offense to the op's app. This is just universal. Every web app I've ever used feels like crap.
- adamc 3y ago
  "Every" is too strong, but it's common, I agree. I infer it is very challenging to get things to work across web platforms (browsers and OS versions).
- MH15 3y ago
  Their demos performed fine for me on both desktop and mobile. Not sure what the issue is here, you're allowed to require some baseline performance level for something like this.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    I had no performance problems, but right on the first demo each scrollbar is broken in it's own unique way. The main area with the sparkgrid has good horizontal and vertical scrollbars, but they are nearly invisible, being dark grey on slightly lighter dark grey, and only visible if you hover in the area they scroll. Also the vertical scroll bar doesn't take you to the very bottom. Then there's the top right area, which has a normal looking scrollbar (good), but once you scroll it changes the size of the entire right panel (weird), and if you drag it past the point where it has reached the bottom (really easy to do accidentally) it starts spasming uncontrollably. If you instead use the scroll wheel, you can scroll to the bottom, but if you scroll a bit further you are back on the top? None of the other scrollbars has either of those issues. Then there's the bottom right, where the scrollbar is visible, takes you all the way to the bottom, and neither spasms nor resets, but just to be special in its own way it starts out as a big bar as if there was little content below the fold, but the further you scroll the smaller the bar gets. As you scroll up, it grows again. It's also stuttering a bit while making these size changes. Another example besides scroll bars is the lack of tool tips on the UI (they do exist on data though!), which makes for a weird toolbar that moves its content all over the place on hover. And I guess you're supposed to guess that check boxes are delete buttons. This doesn't take away from the app, it's still cool and useful, but little annoyances like that add up to make it feel weird and un-native (I guess foreign is the word).
    - texodus 3y ago
      It sounds like you have some browser/OS combination with aggressive scroll inertia enabled. A bug report on our GitHub with some of system details would be appreciated!
- snacktaster 3y ago
  It's because web tech itself is crappy and the ecosystem surrounding it is a complete cesspool.
- simonw 3y ago
  What hardware are you testing them on? I have a recent MacBook Pro and current generation iPhone and they're often indistinguishable from native apps for me - once they've loaded at least.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
denysonique 3y ago
Seems like another website on the HN frontpage today not working with Firefox. (my previous comment regarding this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441337#35454074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441337#35454074)
- paranoidxprod 3y ago
  The site seems to load fine for me on Windows Firefox. Are you having the same error as the parent to your linked comment? Edit: I see the other commenter and yes, the "treemap" is broken for me as well. Not something a noticed but you are correct.
- sporkl 3y ago
  Seems to work mostly fine for me except for the Treemap visualization. Firefox 111.0.1 on macOS 12.5.1
- nanny 3y ago
  Only the "treemap" chart is broken for me, everything else seems to work ok (Firefox Developer Edition 111.0b6 64-bit Linux. Enhanced tracking protection turned on).
- sinistersnare 3y ago
  (I'm a contributor to Perspective) As a Firefox user I definitely want to see better FF support here! The first step is to get a good test suite. Currently our tests only run on Chrome. So after we get tests running on Firefox, we can move to better support it.
- chandureddyvari 3y ago
  Working for me on Firefox Mac.
- lbrindze 3y ago
  I'm having issues with it loading in Safari (14.1.2) on OS X, but it seems to be loading fine with Firefox (111.0.1) for me. Its pretty zippy too, and this computer is no spring chicken...
imachine1980_ 3y ago
relly cool project
cfuendev 3y ago
Definitively not made for lightweight mobile, tried on two browsers (Harmonic HN Client's Webview and Via Browser) and the website crashed my phone.
- deathtrader666 3y ago
  Worked perfectly fine on Brave on Android.
gorbachev 3y ago
I just made a few of our data analysts drool showing them this. Nice work!
xal 3y ago
Awesome project. If there is ever a project that needed an electron app it’s this one. I’d love to have a Perspective.app that efficiently loads local data style files.
- ivanmontillam 3y ago
  Electron is going to kill the good performance gains of Perspective. Even if you have a fully beefed-up workstation, Electron is going to trigger the CPU fans. Electron is discouraged nowadays in favor of lightweight solutions like Sciter[0], Tauri[1] or even WebView2[2]. -- [0]: https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/ [1]: https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/ [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
  - airstrike 3y ago
    I'm building something similar to this and going down the Tauri route
  - eis 3y ago
    I don't see why rendering this in Electron (which is essentially just a bundled Chromium browser) would perform differently than in a standalone browser. Neither do I see how projects like Tauri or WebView2 which just embed the system webview would give better rendering performance. Microsofts webview is even using the same rendering engine as Electron - Blink. What you'd get is significantly smaller binary size but most people don't care much about that.
    - ivanmontillam 3y ago
      > I don't see why rendering this in Electron (which is essentially just a bundled Chromium browser) would perform differently than in a standalone browser. WebView2 has further optimizations as claimed by Microsoft in their recent blog post about Microsoft Teams[0]: "The key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge. Additionally, we have been able to take greater advantage of the native capabilities provided by WebView2 and ensure support for more up-to-date versions of Chromium (latest performance and security updates)." So, I'd assume WebView2 is better than Electron. > What you'd get is significantly smaller binary size but most people don't care much about that. In the case of Sciter (quoted in my parent comment), Sciter is a bit different: The frontend is HTML, CSS and JS, but the app's local backend is whatever you want it to be: C#, C++, Python, Assembly, etc. That's why it's popular among performance-critical software such as malware scanners, where you need native performance but as well as a you know customers that like a nice UI. Any kind of software could benefit from Sciter's approach, if just companies liked to drop a bit more of budget at their shipped products. -- [0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-advantages-of-the-new-architecture/ba-p/3775704 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...
haolez 3y ago
This looks pretty awesome. What's the catch? There has to be something :)
- nothrowaways 3y ago
  Same question:)
egeozcan 3y ago
These aren't accessible at all. Did you try using the components with a screen reader, with just a keyboard and in high contrast modes? They look amazing but I'm a bit puzzled to why in 2023, a11y would not be a priority. Even this landing page itself isn't keyboard friendly. Some patterns to help you get started with ARIA: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ Designing for a11y: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/
- troymc 3y ago
  It's an open source project. You could create an issue on their GitHub repo, or better yet, create a PR and reference this existing issue: https://github.com/finos/perspective/issues/2133 https://github.com/finos/perspective/issues/2133
  - egeozcan 3y ago
    I just commented about something I found lacking, it's not a hostile comment, and suggested improvements to the authors who seem to be hanging out here. I think if they have interest, they can add these as an issue, or choose not to. To the downvoters: Do you really think I should open issues for every critic I place to open source projects here and otherwise not mention anything? I also love and contribute to open-source but this feels like too demanding.
- supermatt 3y ago
  Ironically your website doesn't meet the first criterion of the WAI design tips you linked (the nav links): https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/#provide-sufficient-contrast-between-foreground-and-background https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/#provide-sufficient-co... No doubt I have poor a11y on my own projects - but if you are going to launch into critique of the landing page, at least do it from a position of authority :) TBH, I am not sure how a charting lib could effectively be accessible to any great extent. Its not covered in the resources you linked, and in my experience with other charting libs this seems to be commonplace. I would be interested if you have any insights or suggestions on that, as I use charts extensively on one of my projects.
andrewcamel 3y ago
Big fan of this... suspect a lot of the modern SaaS BI / analytics players would benefit. Just end up hitting limits trying to use Javascript to render large datasets, having tried to build some of this myself. Happy to share some potential use cases / thoughts on where you could apply this if helpful! Feel free to reach out.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Also interested in disrupting this space, do you have a preferred contact method?
andybak 3y ago
What the hell is BI?
- johnzim 3y ago
  Business Intelligence
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    What does that mean or imply?
    - NortySpock 3y ago
      People inside a company prefer to have financial and operational information to make informed operational decisions or projections. Sometimes that data is stored in a variety of places (excel files, a smattering of disconnected databases, sometimes enriching the data with more data pulled from an API...). Extracting that data to a common location (historically called a data warehouse) tends to be the work of a data pipeline, and the tool used to join, display, filter, dynamically aggregate, and visualize the data has been historically categorized as a "Business Intelligence" tool. Normally these BI tools provide data caching and allow temporary integration of multiple data sources. The intent is to make it easy for business users to explore, analyze, visualize, share, and present datasets or results. The biggest examples off the top of my head would be PowerBI, Tableau, and Apache Superset, but "data reporting tool" is a competitive market with many entrants.
      - CyberDildonics 3y ago
        Sounds like essentially consolidating data in a database and visualizing it. Is there a difference between a database and a "data warehouse"?
        pnut 3y ago
        Yes, they have fundamentally different architectures to serve their respective use cases.
szundi 3y ago
We reinvent the wheel again. But new tech. Perfect.
nextworddev 3y ago
Given how powerful Apache Arrow is, there's a lot of promise to this library.
infinite8s 3y ago
Nice texodus! What's new since you spun it out into prospective? I worked on perspective a long time ago when it was still proprietary ;)
lerela 3y ago
On my end examples do not work (empty placeholders) with Firefox (on Linux). They work well with Chrome though.
epups 3y ago
This is excellent. Snappy and pretty, two qualities that often elude BI apps.

328 points by texodus 3y ago

why are web apps always so janky. no offense to the op's app. This is just universal. Every web app I've ever used feels like crap.

adamc 3y ago
"Every" is too strong, but it's common, I agree. I infer it is very challenging to get things to work across web platforms (browsers and OS versions).
MH15 3y ago
Their demos performed fine for me on both desktop and mobile. Not sure what the issue is here, you're allowed to require some baseline performance level for something like this.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  I had no performance problems, but right on the first demo each scrollbar is broken in it's own unique way. The main area with the sparkgrid has good horizontal and vertical scrollbars, but they are nearly invisible, being dark grey on slightly lighter dark grey, and only visible if you hover in the area they scroll. Also the vertical scroll bar doesn't take you to the very bottom. Then there's the top right area, which has a normal looking scrollbar (good), but once you scroll it changes the size of the entire right panel (weird), and if you drag it past the point where it has reached the bottom (really easy to do accidentally) it starts spasming uncontrollably. If you instead use the scroll wheel, you can scroll to the bottom, but if you scroll a bit further you are back on the top? None of the other scrollbars has either of those issues. Then there's the bottom right, where the scrollbar is visible, takes you all the way to the bottom, and neither spasms nor resets, but just to be special in its own way it starts out as a big bar as if there was little content below the fold, but the further you scroll the smaller the bar gets. As you scroll up, it grows again. It's also stuttering a bit while making these size changes. Another example besides scroll bars is the lack of tool tips on the UI (they do exist on data though!), which makes for a weird toolbar that moves its content all over the place on hover. And I guess you're supposed to guess that check boxes are delete buttons. This doesn't take away from the app, it's still cool and useful, but little annoyances like that add up to make it feel weird and un-native (I guess foreign is the word).
  - texodus 3y ago
    It sounds like you have some browser/OS combination with aggressive scroll inertia enabled. A bug report on our GitHub with some of system details would be appreciated!
snacktaster 3y ago
It's because web tech itself is crappy and the ecosystem surrounding it is a complete cesspool.
simonw 3y ago
What hardware are you testing them on? I have a recent MacBook Pro and current generation iPhone and they're often indistinguishable from native apps for me - once they've loaded at least.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

denysonique 3y ago

Seems like another website on the HN frontpage today not working with Firefox. (my previous comment regarding this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441337#35454074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441337#35454074)

paranoidxprod 3y ago
The site seems to load fine for me on Windows Firefox. Are you having the same error as the parent to your linked comment? Edit: I see the other commenter and yes, the "treemap" is broken for me as well. Not something a noticed but you are correct.
sporkl 3y ago
Seems to work mostly fine for me except for the Treemap visualization. Firefox 111.0.1 on macOS 12.5.1
nanny 3y ago
Only the "treemap" chart is broken for me, everything else seems to work ok (Firefox Developer Edition 111.0b6 64-bit Linux. Enhanced tracking protection turned on).
sinistersnare 3y ago
(I'm a contributor to Perspective) As a Firefox user I definitely want to see better FF support here! The first step is to get a good test suite. Currently our tests only run on Chrome. So after we get tests running on Firefox, we can move to better support it.
chandureddyvari 3y ago
Working for me on Firefox Mac.
lbrindze 3y ago
I'm having issues with it loading in Safari (14.1.2) on OS X, but it seems to be loading fine with Firefox (111.0.1) for me. Its pretty zippy too, and this computer is no spring chicken...

imachine1980_ 3y ago

relly cool project

cfuendev 3y ago

Definitively not made for lightweight mobile, tried on two browsers (Harmonic HN Client's Webview and Via Browser) and the website crashed my phone.

deathtrader666 3y ago
Worked perfectly fine on Brave on Android.

gorbachev 3y ago

I just made a few of our data analysts drool showing them this. Nice work!

xal 3y ago

Awesome project. If there is ever a project that needed an electron app it’s this one. I’d love to have a Perspective.app that efficiently loads local data style files.

ivanmontillam 3y ago
Electron is going to kill the good performance gains of Perspective. Even if you have a fully beefed-up workstation, Electron is going to trigger the CPU fans. Electron is discouraged nowadays in favor of lightweight solutions like Sciter[0], Tauri[1] or even WebView2[2]. -- [0]: https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/ [1]: https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/ [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
- airstrike 3y ago
  I'm building something similar to this and going down the Tauri route
- eis 3y ago
  I don't see why rendering this in Electron (which is essentially just a bundled Chromium browser) would perform differently than in a standalone browser. Neither do I see how projects like Tauri or WebView2 which just embed the system webview would give better rendering performance. Microsofts webview is even using the same rendering engine as Electron - Blink. What you'd get is significantly smaller binary size but most people don't care much about that.
  - ivanmontillam 3y ago
    > I don't see why rendering this in Electron (which is essentially just a bundled Chromium browser) would perform differently than in a standalone browser. WebView2 has further optimizations as claimed by Microsoft in their recent blog post about Microsoft Teams[0]: "The key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge. Additionally, we have been able to take greater advantage of the native capabilities provided by WebView2 and ensure support for more up-to-date versions of Chromium (latest performance and security updates)." So, I'd assume WebView2 is better than Electron. > What you'd get is significantly smaller binary size but most people don't care much about that. In the case of Sciter (quoted in my parent comment), Sciter is a bit different: The frontend is HTML, CSS and JS, but the app's local backend is whatever you want it to be: C#, C++, Python, Assembly, etc. That's why it's popular among performance-critical software such as malware scanners, where you need native performance but as well as a you know customers that like a nice UI. Any kind of software could benefit from Sciter's approach, if just companies liked to drop a bit more of budget at their shipped products. -- [0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-advantages-of-the-new-architecture/ba-p/3775704 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...

haolez 3y ago

This looks pretty awesome. What's the catch? There has to be something :)

nothrowaways 3y ago
Same question:)

egeozcan 3y ago

These aren't accessible at all. Did you try using the components with a screen reader, with just a keyboard and in high contrast modes? They look amazing but I'm a bit puzzled to why in 2023, a11y would not be a priority. Even this landing page itself isn't keyboard friendly. Some patterns to help you get started with ARIA: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ Designing for a11y: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/

troymc 3y ago
It's an open source project. You could create an issue on their GitHub repo, or better yet, create a PR and reference this existing issue: https://github.com/finos/perspective/issues/2133 https://github.com/finos/perspective/issues/2133
- egeozcan 3y ago
  I just commented about something I found lacking, it's not a hostile comment, and suggested improvements to the authors who seem to be hanging out here. I think if they have interest, they can add these as an issue, or choose not to. To the downvoters: Do you really think I should open issues for every critic I place to open source projects here and otherwise not mention anything? I also love and contribute to open-source but this feels like too demanding.
supermatt 3y ago
Ironically your website doesn't meet the first criterion of the WAI design tips you linked (the nav links): https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/#provide-sufficient-contrast-between-foreground-and-background https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/#provide-sufficient-co... No doubt I have poor a11y on my own projects - but if you are going to launch into critique of the landing page, at least do it from a position of authority :) TBH, I am not sure how a charting lib could effectively be accessible to any great extent. Its not covered in the resources you linked, and in my experience with other charting libs this seems to be commonplace. I would be interested if you have any insights or suggestions on that, as I use charts extensively on one of my projects.

andrewcamel 3y ago

Big fan of this... suspect a lot of the modern SaaS BI / analytics players would benefit. Just end up hitting limits trying to use Javascript to render large datasets, having tried to build some of this myself. Happy to share some potential use cases / thoughts on where you could apply this if helpful! Feel free to reach out.

intelVISA 3y ago
Also interested in disrupting this space, do you have a preferred contact method?

andybak 3y ago

What the hell is BI?

johnzim 3y ago
Business Intelligence
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  What does that mean or imply?
  - NortySpock 3y ago
    People inside a company prefer to have financial and operational information to make informed operational decisions or projections. Sometimes that data is stored in a variety of places (excel files, a smattering of disconnected databases, sometimes enriching the data with more data pulled from an API...). Extracting that data to a common location (historically called a data warehouse) tends to be the work of a data pipeline, and the tool used to join, display, filter, dynamically aggregate, and visualize the data has been historically categorized as a "Business Intelligence" tool. Normally these BI tools provide data caching and allow temporary integration of multiple data sources. The intent is to make it easy for business users to explore, analyze, visualize, share, and present datasets or results. The biggest examples off the top of my head would be PowerBI, Tableau, and Apache Superset, but "data reporting tool" is a competitive market with many entrants.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      Sounds like essentially consolidating data in a database and visualizing it. Is there a difference between a database and a "data warehouse"?
      - pnut 3y ago
        Yes, they have fundamentally different architectures to serve their respective use cases.

szundi 3y ago

We reinvent the wheel again. But new tech. Perfect.

nextworddev 3y ago

Given how powerful Apache Arrow is, there's a lot of promise to this library.

infinite8s 3y ago

Nice texodus! What's new since you spun it out into prospective? I worked on perspective a long time ago when it was still proprietary ;)

lerela 3y ago

On my end examples do not work (empty placeholders) with Firefox (on Linux). They work well with Chrome though.

epups 3y ago

This is excellent. Snappy and pretty, two qualities that often elude BI apps.