⚠️ Vis.js - End of Live

[mojoaxel]

I'm thinking about opening this issues for many month now. Today the time has come:

This is the beginning of the end of vis as we know it - and hopefully a new beginning.

Current status

• There are still a lot of issues opened every week and even more issues are still open.
• vis has currently no real maintainer. I and some other people still have admin-access but nobody has the time to review pull-requests, commend on Issues or fix bugs.
• almende, the company that created vis is no more willing to spend any time or money on this project.

This project can not go on like this!

Future steps

1. We, the current maintainers of this project have decided to archive this project what makes the project read-only. This means that no more issues or pull-requests can be created. The source-code and all releases are still available.
2. We want to invest one last boost of energy to merge as many pull-requests as possible/usefull and seperate the library in multiple components (network, timeline, grahp3d ...). This new libraries will find a new home in the already existent visjs community account. You can open new issues and pull-requests there, after we've moved.
3. We will try to move the existing open-collective to this new community to give every collaborator a chance to be reimbursed by the community.
4. We invite everybody interesting in supporting this project to start helping maintaining the seperate projects. It depends on you guys to give these new projects a new life by improving the code base and maintaining the new modules. In future, hopefully, this will become much easier as the projects are much smaller and more manageable.

This is propably going to happen in March 2019.

vis.js is dead, long like visjs!

[avrahamcool]

hi @mojoaxel
you should pin this post, so it'll be visible above all others.

[yotamberk]

The timeline has been separated to my fork here:
https://github.com/yotamberk/timeline-plus

It is maintained actively every week.
Soon it will move to visjs community. Feel free to use it in the meantime until I can move it to the community.

[jgorene]

It would be cool to be able to leave this last version as operational as possible as @mojoaxel suggested on #4197

In fact and to take an example, if someone can make graph2d work properly from the latest version or even on the branch develop, good deal...

Otherwise and in general if we can't fix this type of bugs, wouldn't it be better down to an earlier version when the currently broken functionality was still working properly... until 4.20.1 for example?

I'm just wondering... and what do you think about that ?

[micahstubbs]

The network module lives on in our community fork here:
https://github.com/visjs-community/visjs-network

It is actively maintained, with multiple contributors from the visjs community ☺

We also publish regularly to npm https://www.npmjs.com/package/visjs-network

you can start using the latest visjs-network features & bug fixes today with the command:

npm install visjs-network

or

yarn add visjs-network

[micahstubbs]

like @yotamberk says, I do think it would be nice to have https://github.com/yotamberk/timeline-plus and https://github.com/visjs-community/visjs-network under a common github org, to make it easier visjs users to discover the projects and collaborate.

[mojoaxel]

@yotamberk @micahstubbs Feel free to move your projects to the visjs community account whenever you want!

[micahstubbs]

@mojoaxel I think that could make sense once vis itself migrates to https://github.com/visjs github org. Do you know if there are plans to do that?

[mojoaxel]

@mojoaxel I think that could make sense once vis itself migrates to https://github.com/visjs github org. Do you know if there are plans to do that?

The plan is not to migrate the whole project. Instead I'm planning of splitting it up into its modules (network, timeline..) and find a team of maintainers for each modules. (Looks good already!)
We than cloud create a meta-projects that includes all modules and releases one single visjs.min.js for users who need this.

I'm planning to do this Mar/Apr 2019 as soon as I find the time.

To anybody who wants to support/speed-up the migration: please consider funding the development using our opencollective: https://opencollective.com/vis

[s7726]

https://github.com/almende/vis
https://github.com/visjs-community/
https://github.com/visjs
https://github.com/yotamberk/timeline-plus

This fragmentation is tough to sort through.

[mojoaxel]

This fragmentation is tough to sort through.

Yes, it is! 😞
I hope we can merge all this into one organization again within the coming weeks.

[oussjarrousse]

Time to merge/move guys! How can i help?

[ts-ign0re]

You have to archive the project as soon as possible. Hope is not a solution.

[mojoaxel]

You have to archive the project as soon as possible.

Finding time is not easy but I have scheduled the transfomation fom the almende to the visjs account for the 8-9.06.2019.

[WhitecastlePT]

Well i'm sad this awesome plugin is going to end...i have been using mainly because of timeline.
Since TimeLine is going to be separate project, will it have a migration documentation from vis.js timeline to timeline-plus from https://github.com/yotamberk/timeline-plus ? @yotamberk

Btw i made a 5 dolar contribution https://opencollective.com/vis#budget

[mojoaxel]

I'm starting the process of moving alemde/vis to the visjs community NOW.
If you have questions you can reach me here: https://gitter.im/vis-js/Lobby

[mojoaxel]

Here i'm going to track the progress of the transformation and document what I did (for future maintainers maybe!?)

• I have forked almende/vis to visjs/vis_original for further development.
• Updated repository details
• created a new webpage for the community: https://github.com/visjs/www.visjs.org
• Update the README to show a EOL message.
• updated the github templates to show a EOL message.
• Created a PR to master: End of live #4306
• Separated vis-uuid into its own repository
• Separated vis-util into its own repository
• still working on it...

[hypery2k]

This fragmentation is tough to sort through.

Yes, it is! 😞
I hope we can merge all this into one organization again within the coming weeks.

Any news on the merge? ;)

[mojoaxel]

Any news on the merge? ;)

I'm happy to say that I managed to leap a giant step forward yesterday: I removed gulp/webpack in favor of rollup and can now start to split the vis-charts library in separated projects - saving the git commit history :-)

If everything works out like I planned it I can release the new libraries this weekend or next week.

After that this repository finally gets archived and the new libraries can be used...

After I delivered what I promised I hope that @yotamberk and the others will (again) join the visjs community 🙏

[drscotthawley]

Help? I just discovered vis.js and graph3d over the weekend (after googling "javascript 3d data point visualization") and was quickly able to do almost what I needed -- to make a 3d scatter plot -- but still need to (learn how to) make a few changes..
After reading the web pages and then this thread, I'm confused about how to ask questions and/or contribute.

I've read the How to help post, but then when I go over to visjs community I don't see graph3d on the list, and when I go inside vis_original there's some graph3d stuff but there's no Issues or Pull Requests tabs. For now I've started my own fork but...not sure how/where to ask questions when I get stuck.

Can someone advise, re. which account or repository I should be looking at?

Literally, all I want to do is plot a bunch of points in 3D, except make some the markers different shapes (e.g. make some of them squares or crosses ), or perhaps still all circles, but allow them to be both different colors and different sizes, not just color or size.).

Thanks!

[mojoaxel]

I'm confused about how to ask questions and/or contribute.

@drscotthawley You have every reason to be confused!
At the moment we are moving everything to the visjs community, but this is not finished, yet.

There is a very good chance that a vis-garph3d repository will pop up in the visjs community during the next days. Than you are very welcome to contribute.

For now I've started my own fork

This is probably not the best thing to do...already so much confusion.

[yotamberk]

Hey guys.
I plan to move https://github.com/yotamberk/timeline-plus to vis-community this Saturday.
I hope the confusion with the timeline will be cleared up with the transfer

[mojoaxel]

I see a big conflict rise here!
Let me explain my view:

vis.js is a very big project with a long history. Starting with professional almende contributions and later maintained my me, yotamberg and may others. Later we had no more time to maintain the whole library, answer the countless beginner questions or feature-requests.
This was the moment @micahstubbs and @yotamberk just copied (not forked!) the project, through away the contribution history and fiddled together some working libraries for themselves and maybe others. This is probably what kept vis.js alive for now and I understand this practical approach. But I have to say I don't support it!!

It leaves behind the whole community and more important the whole project history.
If you have a look in the contributor panel of vis-network there are now 3 contributors listed. The reality is greater than 100. It is the same thing with the timeline-plus here 14 contributors are listed instead of >100. This is because the git-history was deleted, out of convenience.

While this approach is fully legal due to the open licenses, I still think it is not how we should act as a open-source community! Forking Yes! Copying code without attribution: No!

This is why I took the (already existing) visjs community account from AlexDM0 and created a new home for vis.js to flourish as a whole. Than I invidet everybody to joun the new community. The idea of this community is to provide each library (timeline, network ...) as its own module with its own maintainer team, while saving the projects history, website and community spirit.

With the help of @Thomaash I already separated the module vis-util (common helpers) and vis-data (DataSet, DataView, Queue) during the last days.
I think we also can provide vis-timeline, vis-network and vis-graph3d soon (hopefully this week), all while keeping the full git history of almost each file. At the same time we modernizes the build process and added typescript support.

I honestly hope is that after doing the split each project can find a team of maintainers. Ideally the pull-requests from timeline-plus and other private implementations can be transferred also to the newly created libraries! The visjs community will also continue to support the opencollective "vis" and the homepage "visjs.org".

"You got to be free
Come together, right now" - John Lennon

[mojoaxel]

Can someone advise, re. which account or repository I should be looking at?

@drscotthawley I just publishes vis-graph3d. Feel free to use try it.

[yotamberk]

I understand what you're saying. To be fair, there were many legitimate reasons why I copied the project and not forked it in the first place, mainly due to having a real hard time trying to advance timeline without a lot of noise and restrictions of the project, whilst disagreement of the owners to separate the modules in the first place.
I'm glad the separation was done at the end - though a little too late since now the continues work done in the copy and merging them in visjs-community will be much much more difficult....

I did said I will be willing to work on re-merging the work done in my copy starting on Saturday.
I have no idea how much work will actually need to be done to achieve this goal but I will definitely give it a try for the sake of reason!
Since this will be probably a lot of work, I will ask to receive part of the open-collective funds. I will assess the work and discuss openly how much work, time and effort I'm willing to do and for the portion of the funds.

I'm also willing to continue as the main maintainer of this module as long as I have full access and ownership on it.

[mojoaxel]

I understand what you're saying...

I'm really happy that you understand. Also I'm sorry that this took me so long! I'm looking forward working with you again!

I have no idea how much work will actually need to be done to achieve this goal but I will definitely give it a try for the sake of reason!

👍 Great! I'll help if I can.

Since this will be probably a lot of work, I will ask to receive part of the open-collective funds. I will assess the work and discuss openly how much work, time and effort I'm willing to do and for the portion of the funds.

This sounds reasonable! I also hope to get some of the funds for doing the separation into modules. I'm sure we will figure this out!!

I really hope that some people here read what we are saying and consider becoming a sponsor to support further development! We think we have proven that we are willing to keep this project going, but we need funds to finance all this work. 🙏

I'm also willing to continue as the main maintainer of this module as long as I have full access and ownership on it.

I just released the new vis-network module. The timeline is the only one still missing. I'll finish the separation this week and and than we can try to update it together. As soon as the repository exists I'll give you full access (of course!)

[richardeaxon]

Glad to see that the new https://github.com/visjs/vis-network has been released. Works great as a replacement for almende vis. Are there any plans to merge the pull requests left behind on almende vis into the new community vis?

[micahstubbs]

hi @richardeaxon, we've already done this 😄

We have merged all of the active, working network-related PRs from almende/vis - you can see the list here https://github.com/visjs-community/visjs-network/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed

Install via yarn:

yarn add visjs-network

Install via npm:

npm install visjs-network

[micahstubbs]

I'm not sure what the status of @mojoaxel's fork is with regard to to including open PRs from almende/vis. He probably knows more about that.

[mojoaxel]

Glad to see that the new https://github.com/visjs/vis-network has been released. Works great as a replacement for almende vis.

Thanks! It was a peace of work! But I'm olso happy that we are finally getting somewhere..

Are there any plans to merge the pull requests left behind on almende vis into the new community vis?

I'll contact the original contributors and ask them if are willing to reopen theirs pull request at the new repository. If they don't we will properly move them one by one. But to be honest I would prefer the original contributors to provide their code. This way they get attribution an maybe feel more responsible to fix bugs in "their" code and maybe even get more involved.

[hypery2k]

one question: What do you think about merging my angular-integration to vis org? I would still maintain it there.

[mojoaxel]

one question: What do you think about merging my angular-integration to vis org? I would still maintain it there.

ngx-vis Looks very promising!
I would love it if you would consider moving it to the visjs community. Maybe the best way would be to also seperate it into a timeline and a network part or even add the new ngx-classes directly into the new libraries. I'm not sure what the best way is at the moment. Also we already have someone moving everything to typescript. We should discuss this nice idea further!!

I think the best way would be to open an issue at vis-network and discuss the best way to approach this over there.

[mojoaxel]

I'm happy to announce that vis.js is now fully managed by the community:

• The homepage www.visjs.org is now maintained in a separated repository: /visjs/www.visjs.org
• The library has been spit up into multible modules:
  • vis-network
  • vis-timeline
  • vis-graph3d
  • vis-data
• There is now a awesome list of vis.js ressources.

Please feel free to contribute to the new repositories and/or sponsor further development.