ORIGIN

ECharts (a contraction of Enterprise Charts) is a commercial charting solution originally intended to address the report need of the Company's various business systems, such as Baidu Promotion (凤巢), Advertising Manager (广告管家). Previously we used Flash to fulfill those needs, but the problem is, due to Baidu's highly clear-cut division of labor, there is a special team in charge of Flash. As a result, everything – from the design of data interface to personalized needs - has to be negotiated and agreed upon, leaving little room for front-end engineers to control completely. Moreover, there is no Flash common to all the scenes in a system. Worse still, Steve Jobs, the co-founder and then CEO of Apple Inc., insisted that Apple wouldn't allow Flash on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. For all these reasons, and given the soaring popularity of html5, we decided to try something else. Therefore in early 2012 Lin Feng (Kener), the then front-end technical director of Baidu Promotion, tried to make charts via Canvas in the Data Platform Project of Baidu Promotion. He wrote a whole new lightweight Canvas library ZRender, which is actually the prototype of ECharts, albeit miles from the one in front of you now.

Erik, Baidu's senior front-end developer, built the team of Baidu business front-end general technology right after his return. Against the above backdrop, and with the firm support of the front-end team manager Zu Ming, data visualization became an important field of general technology studies. So it's only natural that Lin Feng switched his role and began to head the Baidu business front-end data visualization team, which comprises the foremost front-line software engineers including Shen Yi (tech genius obsessed with web3d), Yang Ji (graphic maniac), Su Shuang (who has hands-on experience of SVG / GUI) and Chen Huaimu (who knows color inside out).

As mentioned above, ECharts is based on ZRender. Back then ZRender had charting features, and we already managed to add the Drag-Recalculate option. Nevertheless, the coupling of various graphic data logic and image rendering, non-modularity, and the arbitrary customized demos made us realize that it was by no means a decent design. Therefore, for the first time we made a large-scale ZRender reconstruction, cutting out all its charting features and making it a pure Canvas library under the hood.

The chart logic from ZRender was then made into the fundamental framework for ECharts Version 0.1, which, to be honest, was still a demo, for the interface was not standardized, and both customization and universality were terrible. Erik, Lin Feng, and three senior engineers from the Flash team (FYI, it was they or their team who made almost all the Flash charts in the Baidu business system over the years) opened six meetings in nearly two months before the final approval and release of ECharts Standard Version 1.0. The standard was defined in pursuit of rational design and high customizability, regardless of implementation costs. So it was like the team was digging itself a bottomless pit. For the ensuing ten months, the team found itself climbing out of the pit step by step.

Lucky for us, we finally made it. On June 30, 2013, ECharts Version 1.0 was launched. And the standard became the API reference of ECharts 1.0 when richer interactivity were added. Its importance is unquestionable despite the fact that it is now only a part of the ECharts documentation. Today when we look back, we sincerely thank the five extraordinary engineers - Lin Feng, Zhao Shu, Erik, Liu Yang, Yang Dong - for setting the spectacular standard. They convinced us that compared with implementation costs, a reasonable interface design is far more important.