SaaS Startup: Refactoring & DataViz
Refactoring JS & jQuery and creating dynamic KendoUI data visualisations
A contract with outside-London B2B SaaS tech startup Objective Manager to refactor their legacy JavaScript & jQuery code, which led to the opportunity to work with them on an exciting data visualisation project.
As the product is B2B only, images in this article are publically-available screenshots (which may not accurately reflect the current application) or technology demos.
Following best practice JavaScript & jQuery performance improvement principles such as these examples, minification, and on-demand script loading with LABjs, page load times across the application were reduced by 30% on average and file sizes reduced by 7.5% on average.
In addition, the formatting and presentation of the code was also tidied. The result of this project was an improved experience for both users and developers.
The success of the previous project led to the opportunity to transform the application's table-based reports to dynamic KendoUI-powered graphs. Other visualisation libraries such as ChartJS and CanvasJS were explored and demo'd, but Kendo provided the best API.
Using the Charts API, the PHP back end fed data to the front end as JSON which Kendo could interpret. The graphs are also responsive - great for tablet devices.