Skip to content

Top Best Ask Show New Jobs

Ask HN: Charting Libraries?

5 pointsclintavo16y ago7 comments

I'm currently adding an analytics module (we have some specific metrics not covered by general packages like Google analytics) to our main web application and we are looking for a good library to create graphs and charts. I've found a couple that generate nice graphs via a .swf file by passing xml parameters, but wondered if anyone had any specific recommendations in this area? Thanks for any guidance anyone can provide.

7 comments

7 comments · 5 top-level

chrisa16y ago· 1 in thread

We use http://amcharts.com/. The thing I like the best about it is that you can customize everything through a visual web based editor, and then just copy the xml that is generated. It has also been stable for us, but one downside of course is that the web browser needs flash installed.

ApolloRising16y ago

amcharts is the one we picked as well

yannis16y ago· 1 in thread

Try JavaScript JSXGRAPH

http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wiki/index.php/Hypotrochoid has a bit of a learning curve though.

Also the jQuery flot plugin http://code.google.com/p/flot/

dsimard16y ago

I'll second the flot recommendation. I recently started using it on a hobby side-project (http://www.gdpinbananas.com/) and am enjoying it.

It's dead-simple and doesn't require a lot of tweaking to make the charts look decent. Check out some of the author's examples here: http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/

gaius16y ago

I'm using Matplotlib with the Agg backend to generate PNGs, great quality, easy to use and fast.

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

http://www.antigrain.com/

booster16y ago

We've had some success with http://www.simplechart.net

It's fairly easy to use and can generate charts in PNG and JPEG format.

keefe16y ago

this is probably not new info but http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ in the flash world, flex comes with a charts package and there is prefuse flare which has some charting ability. It's worth noting that the new versions of flash run off AS3, which is a full fledge programming language so rather than passing in XML parameters you would probably be better of writing some code in AS3 that utilizes the library.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse