I think Raphaël is a nice idea: it’s great for people who want their stuff to be compatible with old versions of internet explorer, and it makes it very easy to build trivial things.
To be honest though, I found that in trying to build anything more complex or with much user interaction, just working directly with SVG APIs and building up my own abstractions as necessary was easier and much more flexible. People shouldn’t be afraid to learn SVG: it’s pretty easy!
For anything driven by data, I recommend looking at D3, which is designed around some very powerful ideas.
We started on a new project Friday and decided to go with Raphael. I'm amazed at what it can do - awesome stuff. Why on earth would you decide to write your own cross browser (vml + svg) library when it's already been done and the result is already very good?
what puts me off raphael 1.0 is the lack of grouped transformations. you can collect elements into sets and perform operations on those, but that doesn't not give you a hierarchical transformation space.
i could be wrong but from a cursory glance it seems this is still the case with raphael 2.0.
[+] [-] jacobolus|14 years ago|reply
To be honest though, I found that in trying to build anything more complex or with much user interaction, just working directly with SVG APIs and building up my own abstractions as necessary was easier and much more flexible. People shouldn’t be afraid to learn SVG: it’s pretty easy!
For anything driven by data, I recommend looking at D3, which is designed around some very powerful ideas.
[+] [-] cubicle67|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ropiku|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|14 years ago|reply
The UI of this slide deck is highly frustrating.
[+] [-] 8ig8|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MartinMond|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exit|14 years ago|reply
i could be wrong but from a cursory glance it seems this is still the case with raphael 2.0.