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

I've used Fusion Charts extensively from within a Java web application, but it should work the same way from Rails since you're just embedding a Flash via HTML or JavaScript and passing it XML data. It's a slick package and their support has always been very responsive.

Answer 2

Regarding amcharts, there's a "free" version with a very few restrictions that generates Flash charts including the 'chart by amCharts.com' mention.

And there's a nice plugin, ambling, that provides you with some helper methods to easily add charts to your views. Please note that amCharts.com reference documentation is still a must to tailor the chart to your requirements.

Answer 3

GoogleCharts and Gruff charts are great, but sometimes they lack some features that I need for more scientific plotting. There is a gem for gnuplot which may be helpful for some of these situations.

http://rgplot.rubyforge.org/

Answer 4

There's also Scruffy. I took a look at the code recently and it seemed easy to modify/extend. It produces svg and (by conversion) png.

Answer 5

I personally prefer JavaScript-based charts over Flash. If that's ok, also check out High Charts. A Rails plugin is also available.

Answer 6

gem 'chart' makes it easy to add ChartJS and NVD3 charts to rails.