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.

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Answer 1

gem 'chart' makes it easy to add ChartJS and NVD3 charts to rails.

Answer 2

In the old days, I decided to roll my own (using RVG/RMagick), mainly because Gruff didn't have everything I wanted. The downside was that finding and eliminating all the bugs in graphing code is a pain. These days Gruff is my choice as it's really gone forward in terms of customization and flexibility.

The standard Gruff templates/color choices suck though, so you'll need to get your hands dirty for best results.

Answer 3

I personally prefer JavaScript-based charts over Flash. If that's ok, also check out High Charts. A Rails plugin is also available.

Answer 4

HighChart - A charting library written in pure JavaScript

Gems like highchart-rails, lazy-high-chart makes the integration with rails easier

Answer 5

GoogleCharts and Gruff charts are great, but sometimes they lack some features that I need for more scientific plotting. There is a gem for gnuplot which may be helpful for some of these situations.

http://rgplot.rubyforge.org/

Answer 6

The new Google Visualization appears to produce charts that are of more varied type, better looking and interactive than Google Graphs.

http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/