Comments on: Sexy charts in less than 5 minutes

By: subcorpus

subcorpus — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

they are sexy …
thats for sure …

By: David Gurba

David Gurba — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

though not *my* favorite library my co-workers have used http://www.fusioncharts.com/ instead? Same setup, similar xml, similar price (1 website for a single developer license is $69 USD. Nearly similar output.

By: Ravi Kumar

Ravi Kumar — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

To make it totally free, you can use FusionCharts Free from http://www.fusioncharts.com/free – it doesn’t come with the imprints or link backs on charts.

By: Uros Jurglic

Uros Jurglic — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

Thanks for advice, I’ve integrated it in my site and I am very happy with it. Great component for sure, in most cases much better than jgruff or ziya.

By: Fernand

Fernand — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

Nice article. I do believe XML/SWF Charts framework actually supports more chart types and packs more features. It think you have misrepresented the price. XML/SWF Charts is free for basic usage and $45 will get you a license and unlimited support. With ZiYa you can pretty much render the same chart as

chart = Ziya::Charts::Column.new
chart.add( :axis_category_text, cities.map( &:name ) )
chart.add( :series, "Population", cities.map( &:population ) )
respond_to do |fmt|
fmt.xml {chart.to_xml}
end

Seems sexy/clean and fancy to me…But then again I might be a bit biased

By: jamiew

jamiew — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

Following along I had mild compile errors with undeclared vars/methods "level" and "value" in the xml.builder.

Thanks for a great article, my graphs are looking slick.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

I just switched from Ziya with XML/SWF to FusionCharts.

XML/SWF sucks in IE. Sucks bad

The configuration for FusionCharts is a lot easier to work with than the confusing terminology that XML/SWF uses. Fusion renders faster than XML/SWF too.

If Fusion ends up failing us in some major way, amCharts will be my next stop.

By: Brian Terlson

Brian Terlson — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

Something to keep in mind about FusionCharts free is that it cannot be used for commercial sites, according to its license. The free version of AmCharts simply has a link back to their website when you use an unlicensed version, so I would say that’s a win for AmCharts on cost – assuming you can deal w/ the link.

As for XML/SWF vs AmCharts vs FusionCharts, I had major problems with XML/SWF and printing in IE and FF, while the other two behaved much better. Having used both AmCharts and FusionCharts with rails, I think AmCharts is a bit better as far usage is concerned, but the biggest problem with AmCharts is the complete lack of solid documentation. At least that I could find.

By: Jack Danger

Jack Danger — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

I’ve come to appreciate Plotr (http://www.solutoire.com/plotr/) – a charting library entirely in javascript based on Prototype.

I’m using it to push a whole lot of calculations onto the client and it seems to be working phenomenally well. Plus it’s easily extensible with custom javascript.

By: Reiner Balt

Reiner Balt — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:06:00 +0000

For Tracks, a RoR based GTD webapp, we’re using Open Flash Chart (http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/)

This is a complete open source flash solution for creating charts. Very nice. Needs better ruby support though