barbased

Barbased is a modular, open-source library designed for building bar-oriented data visualizations and dashboards. It provides a suite of reusable components for rendering vertical and horizontal bars, axes, legends, labels, and interactive elements. The library emphasizes composability, enabling developers to assemble complex charts from small, well-defined building blocks while maintaining a consistent design and interaction model.

Barbased originated in 2018 when a group of data visualization practitioners sought a lightweight, extensible alternative to monolithic charting libraries. The project is hosted on a public repository with ongoing development and community contributions. It is released under an open-source license and welcomes collaboration from developers, researchers, and educators.

The architecture of Barbased is component-based, with core rendering available in SVG and optional support for Canvas to improve performance on large charts. It supports stacked, grouped, and horizontal bars, as well as transitions and theming. The library includes accessibility features such as ARIA roles and keyboard navigation, and a plugin system that allows extensions for data loading, formatting, and custom interactions. Data binding is designed to handle arrays of objects and supports both ordinal and quantitative scales. It also offers data virtualization to manage large datasets efficiently and provides an API intended to be approachable for users familiar with standard visualization libraries.

Barbased is used in academic demonstrations, business dashboards, and educational materials that require approachable bar-chart visualization. It competes with other libraries by prioritizing modularity, performance for bar charts, and extensibility. Documentation and example galleries accompany the project, with active discussions in the issue tracker and ongoing community channels.