Ask HN: Charting Libraries? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Charting Libraries?

5 pointsclintavo7 comments

I'm currently adding an analytics module (we have some specific metrics not covered by general packages like Google analytics) to our main web application and we are looking for a good library to create graphs and charts. I've found a couple that generate nice graphs via a .swf file by passing xml parameters, but wondered if anyone had any specific recommendations in this area? Thanks for any guidance anyone can provide.

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We use http://amcharts.com/. The thing I like the best about it is that you can customize everything through a visual web based editor, and then just copy the xml that is generated. It has also been stable for us, but one downside of course is that the web browser needs flash installed.

amcharts is the one we picked as well

Try JavaScript JSXGRAPH

http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wiki/index.php/Hypotrochoid has a bit of a learning curve though.

Also the jQuery flot plugin http://code.google.com/p/flot/

I'll second the flot recommendation. I recently started using it on a hobby side-project (http://www.gdpinbananas.com/) and am enjoying it.

It's dead-simple and doesn't require a lot of tweaking to make the charts look decent. Check out some of the author's examples here: http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/

I'm using Matplotlib with the Agg backend to generate PNGs, great quality, easy to use and fast.

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

http://www.antigrain.com/

We've had some success with http://www.simplechart.net

It's fairly easy to use and can generate charts in PNG and JPEG format.

this is probably not new info but http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ in the flash world, flex comes with a charts package and there is prefuse flare which has some charting ability. It's worth noting that the new versions of flash run off AS3, which is a full fledge programming language so rather than passing in XML parameters you would probably be better of writing some code in AS3 that utilizes the library.

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