What is your preferred way to produce charts in a Ruby on Rails web application?

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.

<

Answer 1

ChartDirector. Ugly API, but good, server-side image results. Self contained binary.

Answer 2

I have started using protovis to generate SVG charts with javascript. My basic approach in rails is to have a controller that returns the data to be charted as JSON, and scoop it up with a bit of javascript and protovis.

Only downside, is that full IE support (Since it is based on SVG) is currently unavailable straight out of the box... However, current patches go a fair way to providing IE support, details of which can be found here.

Answer 3

I am a fan of Gruff Graphs, but Google Charts is also good if you don't mind relying on an external server.

Answer 4

D3 has become my preferred way add great looking charts to web apps. You have to do a little mroe work that some other frameworks, but the appearance and control outweighs that.

I primarily use SVG, which means no IE8, but that is becoming less of an issue.

Answer 5

The gchartrb gem is no longer maintained, it seems. The author points to these gems:

• googlecharts
• gchart (seems abandoned as well)

Answer 6

I just started using googlecharts for my rails 3 project. It is nice and clean, and seems to be the only google visualization api based gem which is alive. Others are inactive and mostly use the old google charts api (released somewhere in 2007-2008).

https://github.com/mattetti/googlecharts