I noticed that the Frappe team developed Frappe Charts, which enhances Chart.js, yet Frappe Insights, an app heavily reliant on charts, is built on Apache ECharts instead.
Given the overlap in functionality, it seems like a natural fit for Frappe Insights to utilize and further extend Frappe Charts. I assume there’s a specific rationale behind choosing Apache ECharts instead.
Could someone shed light on the reasoning behind this decision?
I’m planning to build a dashboard using Frappe UI and trying to decide whether to use charts from Frappe Insights or Frappe Charts. Some background on this would help inform my decision.
Frappe insights is a standalone BI application that can be plugged into any frappe instance or can be used independently, frappe charts on the other has is a library I believe they built for specifically dashboard view feature of the framework.
Thanks for your response. Yes, I’m aware of the two different use cases, but it’s still unclear to me why I Insights doesn’t leverage Frappe Charts. As you mentioned, Frappe Charts is designed for the dashboard feature of the framework, so why wouldn’t it be leveraged for the dashboard of Frappe Insights?
I am wondering if it has certain limitations and thus the Frappe team decided to start from scratch with something different…
Frappe Charts is a convenient but relatively simple library for data visualization. Apache ECharts is significantly more elaborate.
I don’t know anything about the conversations that took place during the development of Insights, but the developers had a choice between (1) expanding Frappe Charts to do what they wanted to do, and (2) adopting an already existing package. In the end, they’re just different visualization libraries that do different things well.
I’m not familiar enough to go into much detail, though based on my limited understanding it seems like a pretty standard tradeoff: Frappe Charts has a much tighter focus of functionality and a simpler design; Apache ECharts looks more complicated and also more versatile.