What is your preferred way to produce charts in a

Question

I'd like to add some pie, bar and scatter charts to my Ruby on Rails web application. I want want them to be atractive, easy to add and not introduce much overhead.

What charting solution would you recommend?
What are its drawbacks (requires Javascript, Flash, expensive, etc)?

Answer 1

FusionCharts is a very good charting product. Works well with RoR. Their support and forums are good. The free version of this product has limited number of charts and features, but no watermark.

Answer 2

Have you tried the Google Charts API? - web service APIs don't really come much simpler. It's free to use, simple to implement, and the charts don't look too shoddy.

Answer 3

In the old days, I decided to roll my own (using RVG/RMagick), mainly because Gruff didn't have everything I wanted. The downside was that finding and eliminating all the bugs in graphing code is a pain. These days Gruff is my choice as it's really gone forward in terms of customization and flexibility.

The standard Gruff templates/color choices suck though, so you'll need to get your hands dirty for best results.

Answer 4

We do this by shelling out to gnuplot to generate the charts as PNGs server-side. It's a bit old-school and the charts aren't interactive but it works and is cacheable.

(The other reason we do this is so we can put exactly the same chart in the PDF version of the report).

Answer 5

If you want quite sexy charts, easy to generate, and you can enable Flash, then you should definitely have a look at maani.us xml/swf charts.

Some XML builder behind it and you're ready to go.

Answer 6

Open Flash Chart II is a free option that gives very nice output. It does, as you'd expect, require Flash.

Fusion Charts is even nicer, but is $499. In researching this, I found a cut-down free version that might serve your needs.