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

Open Flash Chart II is a free option that gives very nice output. It does, as you'd expect, require Flash.

Fusion Charts is even nicer, but is $499. In researching this, I found a cut-down free version that might serve your needs.

Answer 2

We do this by shelling out to gnuplot to generate the charts as PNGs server-side. It's a bit old-school and the charts aren't interactive but it works and is cacheable.

(The other reason we do this is so we can put exactly the same chart in the PDF version of the report).

Answer 3

There's also Scruffy. I took a look at the code recently and it seemed easy to modify/extend. It produces svg and (by conversion) png.

Answer 4

I've used Fusion Charts extensively from within a Java web application, but it should work the same way from Rails since you're just embedding a Flash via HTML or JavaScript and passing it XML data. It's a slick package and their support has always been very responsive.

Answer 5

It requires flash and isn't free (though inexpensive): amcharts.

I've used it successfully and like it. I evaluated a number of options a while back and chose it. At the time, however, Google Charts wasn't as mature as it seems to be now. I would consider that first if I were to re-evaluate now.

Answer 6

If you want quite sexy charts, easy to generate, and you can enable Flash, then you should definitely have a look at maani.us xml/swf charts.

Some XML builder behind it and you're ready to go.