A project dedicated to the generation and cataloging of reusable browser-based graphics
Last decade's predominant model was 'desktop software', in which native user interfaces were written from scratch for each application. Software of this sort often needed to be substantially rewritten in order to operate across Mac, Windows, Linux and other operating systems. The modern answer to this maintenance morass is the web-based application with a browser-based interface, with all its attendant advantages in terms of flexibility, scalability, maintainability and much else. Early browser-based interfaces suffered, however, because browser-based graphics could not measure up to their native desktop counterparts. With the recent explosion in JavaScript-based graphics, however, and especially with the spread of SVG, HTML5, CSS3, and graphics meta-packages such as D3, a purely browser-based interface can now rival almost anything available in a desktop UI. Web-based applications can only proliferate slowly, however, if software engineers all work independently and fail to leverage one another's work. The goal of this project is offer an alternative approach that emphasizes code reuse at least with regard to the graphical aspects of user interfaces.
This approach to graphical code reuse is different than the bargain implicit in most graphical packages, which is this: learn my package, and you won't need to depend on anything else. This bargain is deeply flawed, of course, since all users have different requirements and all packages have different capabilities, and therefore no package can offer all things to all people. The goal of the BAGET project, and of open source more generally, is different in kind. Provide users with both working software and the code that defines it, and thereby give people the opportunity to re-factor, extend, and to otherwise adapt software to their purposes. D3 is particularly well-suited to supporting this role since it allows users to leverage the knowledge they already possess, depending as it does on an understanding of HTML, CSS, the DOM, JavaScript, and JQuery. This approach fails without a knowledgeable user base, of course, but many people do possess some level of skill in some or all of these areas. If you, or else your friendly local software engineer, possess these skills (or else the urge to develop or extend them) then the "adapt, don't adopt" model endorsed by the BAGET project might work for you.