Protovis is a great Javascript-based data visualization toolkit for your web browser that is gaining popularity for it’s ease of use and powerful capabilities. As browsers get more and more powerful and JavaScript engines improve, less and less of this is falling into the realm of Flash and static images, and ProtoVis is on the forefront of the change. Robert Kosara has been teaching ProtoVis for a little while to his students, and has published the first of a series of “ProtoVis Primers” on his website.
This introduction is based on my experiences with using Protovis in my Visualization and Visual Communication class earlier this spring. While the concepts involved are really not that difficult, they are rather foreign to students who have not been exposed to functional programming. And since that is also the case for a lot of hobbyists and people wanting to do visualization who do not have a computer science background, I imagine they run into the same problems.
