LightningChart JS v.4.2 has been released!
Introducing new Developers’ Documentation, Polar heatmaps, improvements for Bar charts, and more!
Polar Heatmaps
Polar charts feature new series types which allow visualizing heatmaps within a polar coordinate system. This type of Polar chart is commonly used in the defense industry. Some key characteristics of the Polar Heatmaps are:
- Processing up to 4 million data points
- Super fast loading speed and CPU-efficient real-time updates
- 100 ms to fully show the heatmap populated with all the data
- Built-in data cursor feature
- Bilinear color interpolation between data points
JavaScript Real-Time Polar Sensor Chart
JavaScript Polar Radar Heatmap Chart
JavaScript Polar Heatmap Chart
Bar Charts
Bar charts are extensively used for visualizing categorical data and are considered a universal type of chart in different industries and applications. Bar charts are significantly used in Business Intelligence (BI) applications due to their effectiveness and simplicity in representing and analyzing data.
In this release, we’re introducing several features for our JavaScript bar charts, including:
- A convenient API that requires minimal configuration
- To create an interactive bar chart, simply plug in categorical data
- Built-in functions
- DataCursor
- Sorting
- Animations
- Overlapping label hiding
- Supports real-time data input
- Different configuration options for label placement and display
- Custom events can be added for drill-drown or extended cursor functionality
- High-performance
- Supports visualization of a few to hundreds of bar charts at top-performance
- Fully-customizable styling options
- Possible to override the default visual appearance
JavaScript Racing Bar Chart
Vertical Bar Chart
Horizontal Bar Chart of Different Global Temperatures
Coordinate Translations
LightningChart JS v.4.2 introduces coordinate translations: a new API for translating between screen coordinates, even locations, and axis coordinates. This mainly enables a variety of important functions:
- Finds the user’s interactions location along the Axes. For instance, clicking to add a data point.
- Positioning external HTML content at an Axis location. Essentially, this allows you to connect any front-end framework component to LightningChart and its Axes.
const locationAxis = {x: Date.now(), y:0}
const locationClient = chart.translateCoordinate(locationAxis, chart.axes, chart.client)
console.log(locationClient)
//
chart.onSeriesBackgroundMouseClick((_, event) -> {
const locationAxis = chart.translateCoordinate(event, chart.axes)
console.log(locationAxis)
})Developer Documentation
For this release, we decided to focus on improving how users learn LightningChart JS. Starting from v.4.2, you can find all developer-oriented instructions, guides, and tutorials in one place: the LightningChart JS Dev Docs. The documentation contains several resources including:
- A Getting Started guide
- Installation guide
- Dedicated guides on over 40 primary and advanced topics
Get started with LightningChart JS v.4.2
If you’re still using a previous version of LightningChart JS, easily migrate to LightningChart JS v.4.2 by checking out the migration guide 4.2.
See more news
Best Apache ECharts Alternative in 2026: When Canvas Hits Its Ceiling
Apache ECharts is an excellent charting library that's the honest starting point, and it's worth saying clearly. Free under the Apache 2.0 license, actively maintained by one of the most active open-source communities in data visualization, with 60,000+ GitHub stars...
Best D3.js Alternatives in 2026: Less Code, More Performance, Same Power
D3.js is the most starred data visualization library in existence 109,000+ GitHub stars and for justifiable reasons. It provides the building blocks to construct any visualization imaginable: data binding, SVG path generation, scale functions, geographic projections,...
Best ApexCharts Alternatives in 2026: Scale Beyond SVG, Add Real 3D
ApexCharts earned its position through a set of genuine strengths executed consistently well: MIT license, the best default visual aesthetics among free JavaScript chart libraries, official and actively maintained React, Vue, and Angular component wrappers, clean...
Best amCharts Alternatives in 2026: No Watermark, Faster, Real 3D
amCharts 5 wins on visual aesthetics. The default chart transitions are among the smoothest in the JavaScript charting space, the animation quality is a genuine differentiator, and the chart type range Gantt charts, flowcharts, geographic maps, financial OHLC, Sankey...
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us!
©LightningChart Ltd 2026. All rights reserved.