Category Archives: Web

Posts about web developement

modular d3 app with commonJS and webpack

Modular d3 app with commonJS and webpack

Creating modular d3 app with commonJS and webpack

In my previous post, I wrote about how to break up the d3 visualization app into different modules. It turns out that there is a better way to write modular d3 app, using commonJS and webpack.

Update on 6/May/2016:(webpack 1, deprecated) For a more idiomatic approach using webpack.optimize.CommonsChunkPlugin, visit webpack’s documentation on code splitting. The approach described in this post has the limitation of not being able to produce separate output files for app and vendor libraries, which is addressed by the idiomatic approach.

Update on 23/March/2017: (webpack 2, recommended) For a more idiomatic approach using CommonsChunkPlugin, visit webpack 2’s guide on code splitting. The approach described in this post has the limitation of not being able to produce separate output files for app and vendor libraries, which is addressed by the idiomatic approach.

Update on 12/Sep/2016: This post is gaining lots of popularity since d3.js v4 is released under npm. The approach described below should still work in theory although I have not tested it. Let me know if it doesn’t.

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d3.js app structure

d3.js app structure – separating concerns

d3.js is a popular JavaScript library mainly used for front-end visualization. There are a lot of examples on how to use it, but there are very few resources that talks about d3.js app structure, i.e. how to break down the app into modular components. In this blog post, I will use my project for visualizing contributions on GitHub to demonstrate the d3.js app structure that I like to use. Continue reading

Web App

Web App is Not Simple – List of web technologies

Web App – The Beginning

When I was JC2 long time ago, web app was simple. When I googled for a tutorial on how to build a web app, the approach that I came up with was:

  • Proprietary server to host the app. I used Union Server because it has documented examples.
  • HTML, CSS, jQuery UI for the front-end user interface. (It seems that nobody uses jQuery UI anymore)
  • jQuery, JavaScript for handling user interactions.

Since the proprietary server has a JavaScript client, with very easy to use APIs, the development was quite easy. I thought I had known everything that I need to know to become a web developer, but I was so wrong. Continue reading

Orbital Project [Apollo 11] – Graphpedia

During the summer vacation, I joined the Orbital project in SoC. This is a module-bearing project for SoC freshmen to get some experience in developing real-life applications(mainly web app or mobile app).

The final product for my team is now hosted on Digital Ocean (initially on Heroku): https://viz.paradite.com/

This a team-based project so I partnered up with Dongyan. I was in charge of backend, routing and the visualization and she is in charge of UI and UX. Continue reading