Web visualisations for data?

Question

I would like to display a bunch of data in a meaningful way through visualizations on a site.

I have been experimenting with RaphaelJS library, but

Answer 1

How about Tableau? Tableau Public (or Tableau Server for private sites) provides a quick and flexible tool for building data visualizations that can be embedded without any plugins. It won't give you full programmatic control though - it's designed for analysts.

Answer 2

We use Google ExplorerCanvas for IE support and then a canvas-based plot library. I've not exhaustively examine the performance, but it works well enough for us in IE 8.

Answer 3

If you do end up going with Flash, consider the following visualization libraries. My personal favorite is Flare, but the Flex Charting Components probably have the easiest learning curve.

• Flare - Open source, pure Actionscript - Demos
• Axiis - Open source, Flex + Degrafa - Demos
• BirdEye - Open source, Flex oriented - Demos
• Flex Charting Components - Proprietary, Flex - Demos under Flex Core Components/Charting
• IBM ILOG Elixir - Proprietary, pretty, Flex Demos under Data Visualization/IBM ILOG Elixir

Answer 4

You may want to check out Google Visualizations API Gallery (which are different from its graphing API). It's a collection of different, cross-browser visualizations. Some are in flash, others render static images. Also, some integrate with GWT.

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Answer 5

There are some fine-looking visualisations at many-eyes.com - which I think is run by IBM. I don't know what they're using though: some kind of Java Applet...

Answer 6

Why not Processing or ProcessingJS?

http://processing.org/

http://processingjs.org/