Asthetic/Scalable color palette

[VijayKrishna]

The tree-map view needs a color scheme that works well with an increasing number of packages/classes. Ideally, we should be looking to implement the following facilities in such a palette:

• the palette can produce an array/range of contrasting colors at scale.
• the palette enables a change in brightness of the colors that it is composed of.
• the palette enables the creation of a color-range based on an existing array of colors/numbers -- this is useful for using such an implementation in the case of metrics like suspiciousness.
• the palette should exist in its own JavaScript (.js) file that allows for the implementation to be tested independent of the rest of the code base.
• the palette-implementation is supported with a suite of unit-tests.

[VijayKrishna]

@maxcn, given that we are using d3.js (http://d3js.org) i think we can leverage the powerful support for colors that d3.js already provides. But to get started with the actual implementation, it might be worthwhile if you got a hang of how colors work in d3. So here are a few resources that you can go over:

• An brief intro to Colors and Scales: http://synthesis.sbecker.net/articles/2012/07/16/learning-d3-part-6-scales-colors
• Yet another nice intro to Colors and Scales: http://www.jeromecukier.net/blog/2011/08/11/d3-scales-and-color/
• The D3.js API for colors: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Colors
• Some sample code/implementation that uses the Colors API: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/5577023

So, play around with the sample code that uses the color api, so that you are comfortable about using d3.js and its colors api. then we can toss around some concrete implementation ideas.

[maxcn]

thanks for the intro and I will go over these intro first.

[VijayKrishna]

@maxcn check out the following two unit-testing frameworks in case you were not able to find any:

• Jasmine: http://jasmine.github.io/2.3/introduction.html ... this looks to be inspired by Behavior driven development
• Quint: https://qunitjs.com/ ... this on the other hand seems to be inspired by Test Driven Development

[maxcn]

@VijayKrishna Thanks.

[VijayKrishna]

@maxcn i just tried jasmine, and it is actually pretty nice and easy to use. if you have not yet figured out a testing framework, please go ahead and take a look at the README on the master branch. Also, i think it might not be a bad idea for you to create a pull request for your patch, so that we can merge it into the master branch. You can add test cases after that.

[VijayKrishna]

Also, if you think that QUnit is better, please go ahead and try that!