GoJS, a JavaScript Library for HTML Diagrams VS gofakeit

If you click on their username, it takes you to their profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonsarris

which says:

I make GoJS, a powerful canvas-based diagramming library:

http://gojs.net/

Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net)

> Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks

I would add a zero if you want serious data. I would also double the timescale. $5,000 over 4 weeks

I second the uselessness of Google Display, it might look like conversions numbers are good but they are 100% too good to be true. As soon as you look into them you find the sources are things like "ad from HappyFunBabyTime Android app". You have to ruthlessly prune daily for months to get anything real, and even then I'm skeptical of value. For a developer tool with very strict conversion metrics!

But I disagree on Google Search:

> Good for conversion, bad for awareness.

Before we were popular it was excellent for awareness. Post popularity its much more arguable.

Creating the Halogen components would be simple enough if one takes inspiration from gojs-react. The issue is that there are no PureScript bindings for the GoJS types themselves, but GoJS does provide .ts.d declarations, which means I could use purescript-read-dts, but that library's maturity/usability seems somewhat ambiguous, according to an author's post from 3 years ago.

used goJS in one project and konva in another

I built GoJS, which is one of the most popular commercial JS diagramming libraries: https://gojs.net

I built carefulwords, a very fast thesaurus and quote site for inspiration, used by... tens of people a day. Eg: https://carefulwords.com/gift https://carefulwords.com/solitude

I mostly made it for myself, me and my wife use it all the time. I am slowly editing down the thesaurus to managable size.

I built a 12x16 "Goose Palace" barn out of local pine timbers, which taught me timber framing, and taught my tiny baby who turned 2 years old while doing it that this is just the kind of thing that people normally do, build barns in their driveway. Some context: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/the-goose-palace

Some photos of building it with the baby: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1584169368203956225

I designed my house, and have been writing extensively about that. Maybe this is the most impactful, since photos of it are all over Pinterest and other sites, now. The first post on that: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/designing-a-new-old-home-...

I am not sure what is most impactful. Maybe ultimately it is building my family.

I made a pull request for GoJS (https://gojs.net)

I have been building this canvas-based graphing library since 2011, and it contains a good number of features around customization and interactivity that are not found in other libraries. It is commercial for non-academic use however.

in one project we use konva, in another we used gojs. Any of them or some other library needs some training and introduce own limitations but it still way way way better than handing all the coordinates, calculations, routing etc on your own.

I am really surprised by this guy's opinion. I make GoJS (https://gojs.net/), a diagramming library written in TypeScript. The project began in 2011 and we converted it to TS in 2018. It's been a huge plus. The sole downside was the initial time it took during conversion, but even in doing so we caught bugs with incorrect input types, documentation mistakes, etc.

On our end, it enforces type safety better than the Google Closure Compiler. There has scarcely been a problem with type complexity that was not ultimately our fault. Just a couple minor things that TS amended later. For that matter the TS experience has only gotten better, generally.

On our users end, we can now give them a .d.ts file that's much richer and easier for us to produce to aid their autocompletion. And we can use that .d.ts file to ensure that all the methods we intended to expose/minify are getting exposed. The advantages with the .d.ts and documentation make it feel almost essential to me for library developers to consider TS.

TypeScript has only made debugging easier, much easier since it catches errors at time of typing unlike the closure compiler. The sole exception is that debugging is a bit slower since I have to transpile instead of just refreshing the browser. But I have tsc set to compile a relatively unminified version of the JS. But if the slowness gets to me, I can just edit the JS output until I solve the issue, and then carry those edits over to the TS. This has never felt like a problem, though maybe his library is significantly more complicated.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have questions about library design + TS.

GoJS might work for you: https://gojs.net

Although the focus of the library is interactivity and not setting up sequences of animation, but that is possible too.

My livelihood has been primarily building a Canvas diagramming library since 2010 (https://gojs.net), if anyone has any questions about 2D Canvas use in the real-world I'd be happy to answer them.

roundRect is great. Though you don't need 4 arcTo in order to make a rounded rect, you can use bezier instead (we do). Their example is also 1% amusing because they set the `fillStyle` but then call `stroke` (and not `fill`). I'll have to do some performance comparisons, since that's the operative thing for my use case (and any library author).

text modifiers are very welcome. It's crazy how annoying measuring still is, especially if you want thinks to look perfectly consistent across browsers. Though the chrome dominance is making things easier in one way, I guess.

context.reset is kinda funny. Most high-performance canvas apps will never want to use it. For that matter you want to set all properties as little as possible, especially setting things like context.font, which are slow even if you're setting it to the same value. (Or it was, I haven't tested that in several years).

I'm sure most users know this by now, but generally for performance the fewer calls you make to the canvas and the context, the beter. This is even true of transforms: It's faster to make your own Matrix class, do all your own matrix translation, rotation, multiplication, etc, and then make a single call to `context.setTransform`, than it is to call the other context methods.

I have to admit that I fell into a rabbit hole, and I noticed that popular tools like fakerjs or gofakeit[0] did not meet my needs.

I needed to generate realistic-looking identities; the person's photo must match the gender, same for the age, the skin color of the person must correspond with the origin of the surname, the first name should be common in the targeted country, and the residential address must be real, among other things.

You would not use this for test data btw, a common use case for this would be for marketing or spamming operations where you need realistic data. My consciense does not accept the later however ;-)

[0] https://github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit

Thank you! No, it’s just random data (here’s a link: https://github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit/blob/master/data/address.go)

So, is JR yet another faking library written in Go? Yes and no. JR indeed implements most of the APIs in fakerjs and Go fake it, but it's also able to stream data directly to stdout, Kafka, Redis and more (Elastic and MongoDB coming). JR can talk directly to Confluent Schema Registry, manage json-schema and Avro schemas, easily maintain coherence and referential integrity. If you need more than what is OOTB in JR, you can also easily pipe your data streams to other cli tools like kcat thanks to its flexibility.

Tangentially related, but there is a package out there called go-fakeit github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit.git for generating random data, which doesn't sound like it entirely maps with what you're doing, but there may be some overlap.

Its not much but I have had success with a random data generator package for golang called https://github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit. Its not live changing but hopefully it helps out enough developers.

Using mock data is a great way to speed up the prototyping process. We will use the GoFakeIt package to create a little dummy data generator to insert into our PDF.

The new v6 release now supports the ability to have localized rand that allows for concurrent generating of random data. Crypto/rand has now been integrated as well as if you have a custom rand that fulfills the math/rand source64 interface you can use it with gofakeit. Let me know your thoughts.

https://github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit