Contributing

Contributions to Paths.js are always welcome! If you feel like helping, be sure to contact me through Github, so that efforts are not duplicated.

The library is currently written in Coffeescript. If you are a Javascript user, don't be scared: it should only take a rapid tour to get you acquainted with the language, as it is semantically very similar to Javascript.

If you do not feel like contributing to the library directly, you can always help by spreading the word, or by improving the demo. I am also developing another demo, based on React.

How can I help?

There are a few things that Paths.js still needs; I will try to keep an updated list here. Of course, other contributions are also welcome - this is just the list of the stuff that I have in mind.

Improve an existing chart

First, there are improvements to be made to existing charts. In particular, the Graph chart is currently pretty slow and unoptimized. This chapter has an overview of existing algorithms for force-directed networks layout, and it would be nice to try out some of the ideas in there. The tree layout algorithm is also quite simplistic in its current implementation, and this chapter features a few possible improvements.

Create a new chart

There are some charts that are still missing from Paths.js, in particular Voronoi diagrams, circle packings and the Circos diagram.

Improve testing and documentations

This does not need much explanation. :-) In particular, I would be happy to receive feedback on how the documentation can be improved. As the author of the library, I happen to understand how to use it fairly well, but I am sure there are pitfalls for beginners.

New general features

I have been tinkering with the idea of allowing arbitrary 2d transformations to be applied to points just before computing the paths. This would allow, for instance, to add a fisheye effect to existing graphs.

Guidelines

There are not many restrictions on how to contribute. Just be sure to follow the general philosophy and add tests for your work (see the existing tests as an example).

Paths.js does not currently depend on external libraries, and it will remain so. There are a couple of reasons for this:

• it is currently very hard to provide a library that depends on third-party libraries in a Javascript environment, while still making sure that this will work with both AMD or Common.js modules, and also as a standalone script
• it helps to keep the size of the library reasonable

Personally, I would have benefited from a collection library, such as Ramda or Lodash, but Coffeescript list comprehensions and ES5 Array methods make this more tolerable.