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

Google charts is very nice, but it's not a rails only solution. You simple use the programming language of your choice to dynamically produce urls that contain the data and google returns you back a nice image with your chart.

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

Answer 2

Have you tried the Google Charts API? - web service APIs don't really come much simpler. It's free to use, simple to implement, and the charts don't look too shoddy.

Answer 3

If you don't need images, and can settle on requiring JavaScript, you could try a client-side solution like the jQuery plugin flot.

Answer 4

I've just found ZiYa produces some really sexy charts and is Rails specific.

The downsides are it uses Flash and if you don't want the sites to link to XML/SWF page it costs $50 per site.

[I've not decided on it yet, but wanted to throw it out there in case people want to vote it up]

Answer 5

This isn't specifically RoR however, it is pretty slick port of Gruff to javascript: http://bluff.jcoglan.com/

Answer 6

Morris.js is nice and open source. I would like to choose it comparing to highcharts. There is a new great video tutorial from Railscasts