Building graphs with D3.js

Using third-party libraries to render content inside Meteor is simple and easy to do, and there are a lot of great libraries out there. One of our personal favorites is the D3.js library (http://d3js.org/). It's well-documented, well-supported, and is a representative example of how to implement other (mostly) self-contained graphics rendering libraries. In this recipe we will create a demo graph application, complete with animations, using D3.js.

Getting ready

We will be using a default project installation, with the client, server, and both folders, and we will of course need the official D3.js package. In a terminal window, navigate to where you would like your project to reside, and execute the following commands:

$ meteor create d3sample
$ cd d3sample
$ rm d3sample.*
$ mkdir {client,server,both}
$ meteor add d3js:d3
$ meteor

With that out of the way, let's build us some sample graphs in D3!

How to do it…

Normally, the D3.js data sources are updated manually, or...