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Comment by dacort | Hacker News Reader

In no particular order: http://g.raphaeljs.com, http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis, http://highcharts.com, http://www.fusioncharts.com/ (Flash)

[edit] Some commentary: I've used Fusion Charts in the past (on tweetstats.com) and it provides some good looking and easy to implement charts. That said, it's Flash but it was the best looking option around when I implemented it back in late '07. Since then, there's been a nice rise in JS charts. gRaphael is amazing, but somewhat buggy and lacking documentation. Highcharts seems very complete and well-documented. I only came across Protovis recently, but it seems pretty darn awesome.

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A few more:

http://www.amcharts.com/ has an extremely comprehensive stock chart in addition to decent flash charts

http://www.rgraph.net/ is an html5 charting library you might want to look at.

I've worked with Fusion Charts for a while now, and their charts 1) have a very comprehensive API 2) are plain beautiful, especially the 3D charts.

JS charts look very promising, and I'm really excited about Highcharts and gRaphael.

If you're looking for something similar to the map component that Google Analytics uses, take a look at http://www.ammap.com/ or http://www.fusioncharts.com/maps/

@dacort - Thanks for pointing me to protovis. Expected it to be more of a hobby project (from the url), but was blown away by how comprehensive it is!

Plug: For dynamic US state intensity maps I created the tool http://www.flashusamap.com/statistics.php

we use protovis for our graphs and it is pretty damn awesome. The cross-browser support (no IE) is an issue until IE 9, but it's pretty incredible stuff. I'm no designer but they make it easy to make pretty complex charts.

The lack of IE support is what kills it for us. We need to do some charting stuff, and we'll probably end up extending gRaphael or Grafico or something and copying several of the Protovis charts.

That said, how have you found the performance to be? Some of their demos are kind of slow, e.g. http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/candlestick.html.

performance hasn't been an issue. The demos are some pretty intricate stuff and for the most part not made for performance. Even most of those have been speedy.

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