Create JavaScript-Powered Data Charts With Billboard.js

Graphics and visuals play a vital role in improving the web content. With modern technology it’s so easy to add custom visuals like SVG icons into your page.

But another surprising visual you can build from scratch is a web chart.

This can help you graph the data visually so your visitors can quickly skim pertinent information. And rather than coding a graph yourself you can use a library like Billboard.js to do all the heavy lifting.

Read Also: 9 Javascript Libraries To Build Interactive Charts

This is actually built on top of D3 which is a JavaScript data visualization library. It’s easily the most popular one out there making it the safest dependency you could ask for.

With Billboard.js you can access the D3 API quickly and easily. The primary goal of Billboard is ease of use, making it accessible to anyone. Although it does help to have some experience with JavaScript, you certainly don’t need to be an expert.

Just note the entire codebase uses ES6 syntax which can be confusing to less-experienced JS devs.

As long as you know how to compile the code you should be fine. We actually covered a few hot features from ES6 if you wanna learn more.

All the technical details about this plugin may seem nice. But you probably just wanna know what this can do.

Have a look at the demo page and click through some of the live examples.

You’ll find everything from pie graphs to scatter plots and custom animated bar graphs.

With Billboard.js you have full control over your data. You control how it appears on the page, how it’s structured, and what type of UI/UX features you add(if any).

It’s really a fantastic chart library and it’s one of the easiest to pick up. Have a look at the project’s GitHub repo to learn more.

You can also dig into this snippet on CodePen if you wanna toy with the code in your browser.