Proposal to remove Graphlot

Asked by Jason Dixon

Once upon a time, Graphlot was merged into graphite-web because it provided a new way of looking at charts. Specifically, it offered an interactive legend as you hovered over the chart. Back in 2010 this was innovative and a great way of looking at data stored with Graphite.

Leap forward to 2014, and everyone is doing client-side rendering. We've got a wealth of 3rd party dashboards and tools that support this sort of interaction. The future of Graphite is (imho) defined by the retrieval and transformative capabilities of its render API, not the static images shown in the Composer window. With tools like Grafana, Giraffe, Dusk and Tessera,we have innovative tools that provide both composition and interactive visualization workflows.

As such, I propose that we remove Graphlot from the Graphite tree. It hasn't received any significant advancements in the last four years. It's far less useful than the Composer for prototyping charts, and it doesn't offer any dashboarding capabilities. With it we had to bring various flot.js libraries into the tree, causing both internal and upstream (distro) packaging headaches. Thanks to the aforementioned tools, I believe there simply is no good reason to keep this on life support any longer.

Looking for feedback.

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Jason Dixon
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Revision history for this message
Jason Dixon (jason-dixongroup) said :
#1

After overwhelming positive feedback (via Twitter and privately), I've submitted pull requests to remove Graphlot and dependencies from 0.9.x and master.

https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/pull/917
https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/pull/918