Javascript Chart Plugin Alternatives

reynoldsftw.com

16 points·mootymoots··7 comments

I wrote a charting program a year/two years ago. http://chartwidget.com

I never did much with it.

I did the same as this guy.

My conclusions Flot (mentioned in his previous article) still kicks ass but needs a bit more work.

Emprise is really nice if you are happy to pay. Personally I think Flot does an equivelent job for free. Although, Emprise also includes some stuff to compute trends which flot doesn't.

Raphaël is totally bad ass, but it's for hand rendering specific data more than just charting since there are little in the way of helper functions for that. That said check this out, it's awesome http://raphaeljs.com/github/impact.html

Right now we are generating PNG graphics using a Ruby library, but I'm looking to move to either Flash or Javascript-based charts.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of Javascript charts vs. Flash? Are the JS charts compatible with Safari and IE? (have had other javascript compatibility issues with them so far)

Most of the examples are compatible with IE6+ which is encouraging...

one big advantage of js/canvas/image based charting as opposed to flash based is that all of the former work on the iphone. chartwidget was running on the iphone a month after it was released, more than a year before the app store was released. Flash based charting still can't do that.

What's the general way to draw these charts in javascript? SVG, Canvas, VML?

flot is also worthy of a mention

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

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