20 March 2012, 14:25

Square open sources JavaScript data analysis library

Example of Tesseract powering a live display of flight data

Electronic payment startup Square has open sourced its JavaScript library for filtering and displaying large data sets in real time. Tesseract is able to quickly aggregate huge amounts of data by using coordinated views and to display the results in a live graph.

In an example on the Tesseract web site, the JavaScript code on the page downloads 5.3MB of flight data from 2001; it then provides different views into the data that can be zoomed into with statistics changing in real time based on the portion of data currently selected. Tesseract was originally created to enable merchants to analyse their payment history for Square's mobile payment application.

The code for the library is available on GitHub under the terms of the Apache 2.0 licence and more information on how the tool works can be found in its API reference.

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