fluent-plots

A declarative and easy-to-use Rust data visualization library for creating static and interactive charts from Polars DataFrames. fluent-plots provides a simple, chainable API for quickly building common plot types.

Features

• Fluent API: Chain methods together to build your chart declaratively.
• Polars DataFrame Integration: Designed to work directly with the powerful Polars DataFrame.
• Dual Backends:
  • (Default) Static chart rendering using plotters (drawing logic still in development).
  • (Optional) Interactive HTML charts powered by charming and ECharts.js.
• Lightweight: The interactive backend is an optional feature to keep your dependency tree small if you only need static plots.

Installation

Add fluent-plots to your Cargo.toml file.

For interactive charts, enable the interactive feature:

[dependencies]
fluent-plots = { version = "0.1.0", features = ["interactive"] }
polars = { version = "0.41", features = ["csv"] } # Needed for the examples

If you only need the static plotting capabilities (once implemented), you can omit the feature flag.

Usage

Here's how to create an interactive bar chart from a Polars DataFrame.

use fluent_plots::barchart;
use polars::prelude::*;
use std::fs;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // 1. Create a DataFrame
    let df = df!(
        "category" => &["A", "B", "C", "D"],
        "value" => &[10, 25, 5, 42],
    )?;

    // 2. Build the chart and generate the HTML
    let html_content = barchart(df)
        .x("category")
        .y("value")
        .to_interactive_html()?;

    // 3. Save the HTML to a file
    fs::write("my_interactive_chart.html", html_content)?;

    Ok(())
}

Creating Different Chart Types

You can easily create other chart types by calling linechart() or scatterplot().

use fluent_plots::linechart;
use polars::prelude::*;
use std::fs;

// ... create your DataFrame `df` ...

let html_content = linechart(df)
    .x("category")
    .y("value")
    .to_interactive_html()?;

fs::write("my_line_chart.html", html_content)?;

Running with the Example Binary

This repository includes a test application in the plot-tester directory (if you choose to include it) that can be run from the command line to generate charts from a CSV file.

First, create a sample_data.csv file:

category,value
A,10
B,25
C,5
D,42
E,18

Then, run the application:

# Generate a bar chart (default)
cargo run -- sample_data.csv

# Generate a line chart
cargo run -- sample_data.csv line

# Generate a scatter plot
cargo run -- sample_data.csv scatter

License

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.