Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#11

Post by vbabiy » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 3:53 PM UTC

I have used a few like jqplot, flot, highchart.

I stuck with flot but if I was to do it again I would give high charts another look.

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#12

Post by TamDenholm » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 3:54 PM UTC

briandoll wrote: post #2

At New Relic, we use HighCharts ( http://highcharts.com/ ). We constantly get questions from our customers about which library we use, because they like the way they look and function. Highly recommended.

I second highcharts, i find it an absolutely excellent chart library. I even created a PHP wrapper for it so i could control it from the backend.

Oh and I did this because i was bored: http://zestmonkey.com/charts.php

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#13

Post by mimori » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 3:55 PM UTC

I like JIT which is a beautiful data visualization library. http://thejit.org/

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#14

Post by meeech » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 3:55 PM UTC

jit is nice http://thejit.org/

demos: http://thejit.org/demos/

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#15

Post by boothead » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 3:58 PM UTC

Protovis http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ hands down. (Assuming a decent browser)

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#16

Post by bluedevil2k » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:02 PM UTC

qbproger wrote: post #3

Flot is worth a shot. There may be a python library to generate is server side. When I looked into it, I kept going back and forth between javascript charts vs images. I ended up going with images because I didn't really need dynamic charts. There were also features missing from many. IIRC, Flot couldn't add a title to the x/y axis at the time I was looking at it.

Use Flot on several of my sites. They have some nice plugins that I like too, and it integrates very nicely with jQuery.

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#17

Post by gregable » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:04 PM UTC

rexreed wrote: post #8

We use the Google Charts API - it's free and very good. But I haven't seen many others comment about it. Is there a problem with using that?

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

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#18

Post by gregable » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:05 PM UTC

This one is pretty fun: http://danvk.org/dygraphs/ - the best part IMO is that the charts are interactive.

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#19

Post by gaius » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:08 PM UTC

gregable wrote: post #18

This one is pretty fun: http://danvk.org/dygraphs/ - the best part IMO is that the charts are interactive.

'Nother vote for this, it rocks.

Re: Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?

#20

Post by bradleyland » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:11 PM UTC

We use Flot currently, but we're looking at purchasing a license for Emprise. Specifically, they offer candlestick charts, which are difficult to find elsewhere, yet absolutely critical in expressing the volatility of series data.

http://www.ejschart.com/

IMO, candlestick charts are way underutilized. Take application response time graphs for example. Most reporting suites rely on moving averages. If your application can have an acceptable average response time, but still have a high level of deviation. Let's say you have an app where, on average, one out of six requests is an entire order of magnitude slower than other requests:

  # Ruby code where r is response in ms
  r = [
    100,
    100,
    100,
    100,
    100,
    1000
  ]

  r.inject{ |sum, ms| sum + ms }.to_f / r.size # => 250

So my average response time is 250ms, which I may consider acceptable, yet some responses are taking 1000ms, which I wouldn't consider acceptable. With a simple line chart, I wouldn't see the significant deviation. With a chandlestick chart, the upper boundary would be blindinly obvious.