

jSlate's available charts provide a starting point for dashboard creators Rasmus Berg Palm has released his JavaScript dashboard framework jSlate as GPLv3 licensed open source. jSlate allows users to create dashboards which retrieve their data from any web-accessible service. The system, which runs as a service on the jslate.com web site, allows users to create dashboard visualisations based on Highcharts JS interactive JavaScript charts and D3 data-driven documents. Each dashboard element is represented as a window which contains the visualisation and behind each is a JavaScript script which can be edited by the user to completely customise the chart to their needs.

Berg Palm told The H that the project has its roots in his Nomnom project, which was created to aggregate and visualise data about the Roskilde festival where he volunteers as part of a "sysadmin/devops group". Nomnom was "much like jSlate" but used couchdb as a backend and required data to be stored in an easily visualised way.

Behind the charts, editable JavaScript allows deep customisation of visualisations Berg Palm wanted to create something that worked as a "blank slate", capable of working with people's existing storage or BI systems. Building on Nomnom, he went on to create the backend agnostic jSlate. He already uses jSlate to visualise information at work as it has "satisfied my usecase".

"I left some very obvious and painfully missing features out for the first release" said Berg Palm, citing the release early philosophy and hoping that now, as open source, the itch to add those features will be "too big to ignore for some people". In theory, as users will need to know JavaScript to use it effectively, Berg Palm hopes that they will also be able to contribute to the project.

(djwm)