The hard requirement was to use a ready made plotting library for Vue. As such, I did quite some research on the available Vue plotting libraries and Apex Charts seemed the best. Unfortunately, for Plotly there is no well supported Vue integration (or at least I couldn’t find it). So going with Apex Charts just made more sense.
Apex:
- has quite a list of available plots: JavaScript Chart Examples & Samples Demo – ApexCharts.js
- and it even goes beyond these basic types as it allows variations, mixing, etc (ie, these are all line charts):
- it’s actively developed, has a strong community, it’s used in thousands of packages, so we can be sure that it will be maintained for at least a few years on
- MIT license
Plotly:
Plotly is great, but unfortunately when it comes to Vue integration, the best I could find was this: GitHub - David-Desmaisons/vue-plotly: 📈 vue wrapper for plotly.js
However, the key part is that the Apex integration is just a package (called StippleApexCharts) which extends the base Stipple library and its API. There is absolutely no problem in also having a StipplePlotly package and the users could employ each, and even both, in the same app.
Apex is a good starting point which follows to the 80-20 rule: it will cover 80% of the use cases for 20% of resources (dev time).