[Incubator Wiki] Update of "EChartsProposal" by JerryTan

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# ECharts Proposal

### Abstract

ECharts is a charting and data visualization library written
in JavaScript.


### Proposal

ECharts provides a powerful, interactive charting and data visualization
 library and framework for web browser, mobile App and backend usage.


### Background

A primary goal of data visualization is to communicate information
clearly and efficiently via statistical graphics, plots and other
graphics.

Numerical data may be presented in dots, lines, or bars, to visually
communicate a quantitative message. Effective visualization helps users
to analyze data .It makes complex data more readable, understandable.[1]

Now data visualization concerns mainly about presentation and
propagation in web, ECharts uses JavaScript as its basic programing
language. It brings great compatibility across multiple platforms, not
only in web browsers, but also in mobile Apps via embedded web engine or
in backend environment via the techniques of headless browser.


### Rationale

ECharts encapsulates the underlying data transformation, control flow,
visual encoding and rendering, receiving the visualization requirements
 with declarative language, and produces interactive charts and components.
We will highlight the features below to illustrate the power that
ECharts already has, and our concerns and our visions:

**User Diversity:**
ECharts expects that its users are not only web developers, but also
people with lesser programing skills. So ECharts enables users to
describe data and settings with declarative language, which lowers
the barrier but without losing the power, and benefit to transfer
and store.

**Configurable Interactions:**
ECharts has provided plenty of interactions and aims at providing more.
Both human interactions and the interactions with upper program are
supported and can be configurable.

**Large Data:**
Although the browser environment and JavaScript bring some performance
limits in visualizing large data or performing animations, ECharts have
been adopting various optimization techniques to rise the upper limit
of the amount of data that it can process, and keep improving the
fluency of interactions and animations.

**Cross-Platform:**
The underlying render engine of ECharts can be switched between
HTMLCanvas, SVG, or VML, which provides good compatibility and brings
opportunities to optimize performance according to different platform
and usage scenarios. Besides, ECharts can also works in backend
environment via headless techniques.

ECharts can be created using headless browsers to pregenerate
reports on more powerful machines for better performance on
resource-limited devices

**Extension and Customization:**
ECharts provides extension mechanisms to make new types of chart and
components, adopt other layout algorithms, or even adopt other render
techniques. Various developers have contributed different types of
extensions based on ECharts.[2]


### Current Status

ECharts has been an open source project on GitHub[3] since 2013.
Currently it has more than 20k stars, more than 50k monthly downloads[4]
in NPM, and is one of the most popular repositories in topic of data
visualization category in GitHub.[5] And it has been used in many
products of Baidu and other companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Netease,
XinHua News Agency,National Bureau of Statistics of China, Sina,
State Grid Corporation of China, Lenovo, Ctrip etc.


### Meritocracy
The ECharts project already operates on meritocratic principles.
It was originally created by Lin Zhifeng in 2013,adding developers
worldwide and has accepted multiple major patches from a diverse set
of contributors.

We will follow ASF meritocratic principles to encourage more
developers to contribute in this project. We know that only active and
committed developers from a diverse set of backgrounds can make ECharts
a successful project. We are also improving the project documentation
and code to help new developers to get started quickly.


### Community

ECharts has been building an active community for the last four years.
Currently, the community includes over 50 contributors .
The core developers of our project are listed below.

### Core Developers

- Su Shuang (https://github.com/100pah sushuang0322@gmail.com )
- Shen Yi (https://github.com/pissang shenyi.914@gmail.com )
- Zhang Wenli (https://github.com/Ovilia me@zhangwenli.com )
- Li Deqing (https://github.com/deqingli annong035@gmail.com)
- Dong Rui (https://github.com/erik168 errorrik@gmail.com)



### Alignment

ECharts is popular in data visualization and charting on web projects.
And ASF has many famous web projects and big data related projects.
We believe that ASF is a perfect choice to help ECharts project to
attract more developers and have more cooperation with existing projects.

### Known Risks
#### Orphaned products
Given the current level of investment in ECharts and the stakeholders
using it - the risk of the project being abandoned is minimal.
Baidu, for example, is in active development to use ECharts in many of
its services and many large corporations including Alibaba, Tencent,
Huawei, Sina, Lenovo use it in their production applications.

#### Inexperience with Open Source
ECharts has been an active open source project for more than 4 years.
During that time, the project has attracted 50+ contributors.

#### Homogenous Developers
The most of core developers are from Baidu, but after ECharts was open
sourced, ECharts received a lot of bug fixes and enhancements from other
 developers not working at Baidu. And the founder of ECharts,Lin Zhifeng,
  still contributes a lot after he left Baidu.


### Reliance on Salaried Developers

Although some of the developers are salaried, the project is personally
initiated from the beginning. The core developers have been dedicated to
this project for four years and have kept the project independent with
developers around the world involved.


### Relationships with Other Apache Products

We have not found an existing charting project in Apache yet. And there is
potential cooperation with some existing Apache projects big data related.


### A Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand

Our interests and motivations are based on the factors mentioned in the
Rationale section rather than the publicity. Furthermore, the brand of
ECharts has been successful in the past years on their own and we would
be happy to keep on this path. We are honored at getting the opportunity
 to join the ASF, with the understanding to ensure its brand policies
 are respected.
Also we expect that Apache brand will help to attract more contributors.

### Documentation

[1] Data Visualization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_visualization

[2] ECharts Extensions:
https://github.com/ecomfe/ECharts#resources

[3] ECharts Information:
https://github.com/ecomfe/ECharts
https://ecomfe.github.io/ECharts-doc/public/en/index.html

[4] ECharts in NPM:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/ECharts

[5] GitHub Data Visualization Topic:
https://github.com/topics/data-visualization


### Initial Source

ECharts has been developed since 2013. It currently has an active
developer and user community with a codebase in JavaScript.
We currently use Github to maintain our source code and track issues
at https://github.com/ecomfe/ECharts
We need to move our respository and issue tracking to Apache
infrastructure.


### Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan
ECharts  source code is available under BSD-3 license and owned by Baidu.
We will work with the committers to get ICLAs signed.
We will provide a Software Grant Agreement from an authorized signer
per https://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant-template.pdf


### External Dependencies

All The dependencies are released under Apache compatible licenses,
including BSD and MIT.


### Required Resources

#### Mail list:
There are currently no mailing lists.
The usual mailing lists are expected to be set up when entering incubation:

+ private@echarts.incubator.apache.org
+ dev@echarts.incubator.apache.org
+ commits@echarts.incubator.apache.org

#### Git Repositories:
Upon entering incubation:
 https://github.com/apache/incubator-echarts

After incubation, we want to move the existing repo from
github/ecomfe/echarts to Apache infrastructure.

#### Issue Tracking:
ECharts currently uses GitHub to track issues. there are more than 7k issues.
Would like to continue to do so while we discuss migration possibilities
 with the ASF Infra committee.

#### URL:
currently the website url is
https://ecomfe.github.io/echarts-doc/public/en/index.html
It will be moved to  http://echarts.incubator.apache.org/
to follow incubator conventions.


### Initial Committers
- Lin Zhifeng (https://github.com/kener kener.linfeng@gmail.com)
- Su Shuang (https://github.com/100pah sushuang0322@gmail.com)
- Shen Yi (https://github.com/pissang shenyi.914@gmail.com)
- Zhang Wenli (https://github.com/Ovilia me@zhangwenli.com)
- Li Deqing (https://github.com/deqingli annong035@gmail.com)
- Wang Junting 
- Dong Rui (https://github.com/erik168 errorrik@gmail.com)
- Huang Houjin (https://github.com/chriswong wfsr@foxmail.com)

### Sponsors:

#### Champion:
Kevin A. McGrail

#### Mentors:
Daniel Gruno
John D. Ament

#### Sponsoring Entity
We are requesting the Incubator to sponsor this project.

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