WPF vs. JavaScript: Which Is Best for Your Charting Project?

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and JavaScript (JS) are popular framework and language options for developing client applications with user interfaces, but they offer distinct advantages and limitations that can impact your decision-making process. Choosing the right technology for your new data visualization or charting project can make a significant difference in both the development process and the final product’s performance. 

If the buck stops with you on deciding whether to use WPF or JavaScript, you’ll want to feel confident in your choice and justify it to the team and stakeholders. You’ll want to know what the wider community thinks, while separating the myths from the facts. Even better, it would help if you had access to data and case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of one framework over the other. 

Ultimately, you want to say a project generated optimum results, and savvy research and decisions from the offset can help make that happen. This guide is one piece of the giant jigsaw puzzle of getting your data to work for your organization in the most efficient way possible. While JavaScript is taking a bold stand as a popular language to build impressive dashboards of charts, we’re looking at why WPF can be more powerful than JavaScript, particularly in high-performance, data-intensive applications, and where JavaScript may fall short. 

There are some rumours in the technical community that WPF may be phased out, but this is far from true, and we covered this in detail in our article: Is WPF Dead? In fact, it’s estimated that there are around one million actively developed WPF applications worldwide, suggesting that WPF isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. 

Support Ecosystem and Documentation

When choosing a development framework, your developers want access to comprehensive documentation, examples, and support. WPF, a mature and well-established framework, boasts an extensive collection of resources.

Microsoft’s official documentation, along with community-driven platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow, provides developers with numerous reference points and practical insights. However, for the most up-to-date, comprehensive and easily accessible documentation, that’s where partnering with experts in WPF charts makes all the difference. It’s about getting the right support for your project to ensure your team members are aligned and up-to-speed with the best practices that get results. 

SciChart’s leading WPF charting library also offers extensive technical support, training materials and documentation. And yes, we ease the onboarding process for new team members! We offer hundreds of code examples, thousands of forum questions, and hundreds of documentation, including tutorials on how to add annotations, cursors, and code for building chart series.

In contrast, JavaScript, particularly when used with open-source chart libraries, may lack this level of support. While there is a large community of JavaScript developers, the quality and consistency of documentation can vary significantly, potentially leading to longer development times and higher costs due to the need for additional troubleshooting and support. 

Check out our series of articles on alternatives to popular JavaScript Chart libraries, which highlight the pros and cons of open source data visualization, such as Chart.js and D3.js. 

Good documentation is only one consideration among many as to why you’d choose WPF over JavaScript, which we explore in the remainder of this article. 

Performance Considerations

Performance is a key differentiator between WPF and JavaScript applications. This is particularly true for applications that require extreme performance and efficient data handling. But which one comes out on top for performance, and why?

As a native desktop framework, WPF offers unparalleled advantages:

1. It allows direct access to low-level hardware acceleration, such as GPU (graphics processing unit) via DirectX, and vectorization, which are crucial for rendering complex visualizations quickly and efficiently. Meanwhile, JavaScript has some access to the GPU via WebGL but no direct hardware access, introducing some overhead compared to desktop applications such as WPF.
   
2. WPF applications allow 64-bit memory addressing, allowing them to handle large volumes of data with minimal overhead, making them ideal for data-intensive tasks, such as real-time stock market applications or scientific simulations. In comparison, JavaScript has a limit of 4GB in the Chrome browser, and memory may be limited to 2GB for your client applications.

3. Multi-threading and use of multiple CPU cores (parallel processing) can only be done in desktop applications, such as WPF, as JavaScript applications are typically limited to a single thread. 

On the other hand, JavaScript, despite its versatility and widespread use in web applications, faces inherent limitations due to the browser environment. The data transfer bottlenecks and rendering constraints within a browser can significantly impact performance, especially for applications requiring high-speed data processing. While memory limits are core issues, SciChart offers workarounds for these, no matter which supported framework or language you choose for your application. 

While JavaScript frameworks can be optimized to some extent, they often cannot match the efficiency and speed of native WPF applications. For example, real-time F1 Pit Strategy Management software built with JavaScript can experience lag or slower data processing, whereas, a WPF-based platform can handle the data throughput more effectively. In fact, to talk numbers, WPF can render tens of billions of data points with ease, compared to tens of millions for JavaScript. 10 million is still impressive, but simply doesn’t quite live up to the data possibilities that WPF has to offer. 

WPF is ideal for building complex, high-performance desktop applications that require close integration with the underlying operating system and hardware. Industries such as medical imaging, financial modeling, and scientific simulations benefit from WPF’s ability to utilize low-level routines for optimal CPU, GPU, and disk performance. Limited by the browser sandbox, JavaScript cannot provide the same level of control or efficiency.

Developer Resources and Long-Term Costs

If you’re a product owner or team lead, the availability and cost of developer resources may well sway your decision when choosing between WPF and JavaScript.

JavaScript developers are more abundant and cheaper to hire, and for that reason it may be a better choice. However, some projects can only be done with WPF, including those with the highest performance needs. WPF also provides more rapid prototyping due to its simpler Microsoft technology stack, especially if you have in-house engineers with C# experience.

Developing complex, high-performance applications in JavaScript can require more time and resources, leading to higher long-term costs. Additionally, the learning curve for transitioning between technologies should not be underestimated. 

WPF developers can leverage the extensive documentation and support ecosystem to maintain and expand applications more efficiently, potentially leading to better long-term outcomes. It’s fast and easy. In fact, it’s possible to create a WPF chart with a clickonce installer, compared to JS which comes with a mountain of tech stack and proficient knowledge in React, Typescript, HTML, and much more. That takes years of training, and developers with this skill set are likely to charge more (and we’re not blaming them). But it’s something to bear in mind. 

Conversely, hiring a seasoned JavaScript developer and training them on WPF might yield better long-term results than continuously dealing with JavaScript’s performance limitations. 

This approach not only ensures the application meets performance expectations, but also reduces the need for constant troubleshooting and optimization, which can be both time-consuming and costly.

Remote Possibilities

WPF previously needed to be processed through a desktop application, a potentially restrictive way to visualize data. After all, the modern world of work often requires remote access to information through a portable device—something that JavaScript seamlessly enables. A field test engineer, for instance, may want to sync the content to a portable device. However, with the advent of Avalonia XPF and Scichart’s support for this, WPF apps are now cross-platform. This means a WPF app can be developed for Windows and Linux.

If you require native performance, 64-bit memory, or multi-threading, WPF is typically recommended over JavaScript.

That being said, with the right software provider and pre-processing data planning, you can port WPF charts into JavaScript. SciChart is a cross-platform solution that lets you work with the optimum charting language for each specific application you require it for. We’ve made SciChart for JavaScript charting as optimal as possible, using WebGL and WebAssembly to get near desktop performance levels. This allows our users to create medical devices, measure rocket telemetry, or even manage Formula One cars using JavaScript dashboards. Between 2011 and 2020, we increased our WPF chart controls from 20,000 data points to 10 billion data points, significantly improving the possibilities for our users. Likewise, our JavaScript chart controls reach millions of data points without slowdown.

So What Is the Verdict?

We’ve offered our insights, but it’s important to weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of WPF and JavaScript for yourself. 

WPF offers a robust support ecosystem, superior performance capabilities, and long-term cost-effectiveness, making it an ideal choice for high-performance, data-intensive applications. 

In contrast, while JavaScript may seem more accessible due to its widespread use and lower initial costs, it may fall short in delivering the performance and efficiency required for complex applications.

Ultimately, the decision should be based on a comprehensive understanding of your project’s specific needs and the technological capabilities of each framework. By carefully considering these factors, you can make an informed choice that aligns with your project’s goals and ensures long-term success.

Reluctant to commit to a single solution for your data visualization projects? SciChart offers both WPF and JavaScript charts, and we are the only native cross-platform library that works across WPF, JavaScript, iOS, and Android.