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Perspective: Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI

328 points| texodus | 2 years ago |perspective.finos.org

71 comments

order

andrewcamel|2 years 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|2 years ago

Also interested in disrupting this space, do you have a preferred contact method?

haolez|2 years ago

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

nextworddev|2 years ago

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

gorbachev|2 years ago

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

epups|2 years ago

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

andybak|2 years ago

What the hell is BI?

mock-possum|2 years ago

I know right? Hilariously bad title, especially considering the I/l ambiguity - a Boys Love novel? Bi-sexual computing? Bachine Learning?

Obviously jargon is a thing, we all deal with it, but when you put something up like this to a more general audience, you’ve got to give some thought to presentation, otherwise you end up with apparent word salad.

johnzim|2 years ago

Business Intelligence

lerela|2 years ago

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

xal|2 years 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.

cfuendev|2 years 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|2 years ago

Worked perfectly fine on Brave on Android.

infinite8s|2 years 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 ;)

VWWHFSfQ|2 years 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.

MH15|2 years 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.

adamc|2 years 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).

simonw|2 years 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.

snacktaster|2 years ago

It's because web tech itself is crappy and the ecosystem surrounding it is a complete cesspool.

denysonique|2 years 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)

sinistersnare|2 years 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.

nanny|2 years 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).

paranoidxprod|2 years 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.

lbrindze|2 years 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...

sporkl|2 years ago

Seems to work mostly fine for me except for the Treemap visualization.

Firefox 111.0.1 on macOS 12.5.1

egeozcan|2 years 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/

Designing for a11y: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/

supermatt|2 years 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-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.

dsmmcken|2 years ago

Menu aside, what is a a screen reader supposed to do with a table changing at 100 msg/s?

texodus|2 years ago

Not sure what specifically you are looking at - the data grid element e.g. is a well-formed, native HTML `<table>`, as recommended by the w3 [1] and renders fine AFAICT with the screen readers in Safari and Chrome (the browsers I have installed).

A specific report on the GitHub for issues you find would be much appreciated!

[1](https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/table/examples/tabl...)

szundi|2 years ago

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