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

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

#41

Post by piranha » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 5:25 PM UTC

bhiggins wrote: post #35

I've only surveyed what's out there a little, but I am impressed with Protovis's demos and apparent flexibility: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/

I've done quite a lot of Protovis charts and should say that they are really great, but have quite steep learning curve. But after making few first steps it starts to make sense and are quite convenient in terms of maintainability and extensibility.

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

#42

Post by ClifReeder » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 5:26 PM UTC

cnlwsu wrote: post #9

Google's visualization apis are amazing, cant recommend it enough. The chart ones are nice but you then also have to wrap it yourself to generate the GET request appropriately to the data.

Agreed, I've been using it for a project and have been very happy so far. Lots of options, and looks great. I've been using the GoogleVisualr library for Rails, so writing them in Ruby is nice too.

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

#43

Post by neodude » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 5:28 PM UTC

mxmpawn wrote: post #5

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.

That's a great library but I'll have to pay u$s360 if I want to use it. In my country it'll be ~u$s1300.

If you're only developing one application, I believe you can just buy the $80 license. That's amazingly inexpensive for such a stellar piece of software.

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

#44

Post by Cyranix » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 5:44 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.

+1 for Highcharts. We use it at MyEdu, switched away from Fusioncharts. I've had to write some workarounds for the occasional bug, but the maintainer is incredibly responsive to feedback, so drop a comment on GitHub or the Highslide forum if you run into an issue.

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

#45

Post by joe8756438 » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 5:55 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 chose to use Highcharts at Perpetually about nine months ago, I must say I am very pleased with how they have developed the library in that time. It has proven flexible enough to handle extremely varied data visualizations. Highly recommended.

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

#46

Post by figured » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 5:58 PM UTC

http://g.raphaeljs.com/

http://www.highcharts.com/

http://www.jqplot.com/

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/gchart

http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/

http://polymaps.org/

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

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

#47

Post by notyourwork » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 6:10 PM UTC

mimori wrote: post #13

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

We were able to use the spacetree to create an organizational chart for our employees which makes it easy for employees to find other employees. This is a great library.

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

#48

Post by jmervin » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 6:34 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.

I've also found flot to be fairly powerful and have used it in a couple of projects.

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

#49

Post by cnlwsu » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 6:47 PM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #30

cnlwsu wrote: post #9

Google's visualization apis are amazing, cant recommend it enough. The chart ones are nice but you then also have to wrap it yourself to generate the GET request appropriately to the data.

The fact that it uses GET is a huge limitation IMO. Especially considering that the workaround is to use POST and iframes. Especially when there are more functional, prettier alternatives

GET is only for the chart api, the visualization api is not the same case (with a couple exceptions that use the chart api) http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall...

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

#50

Post by kilian » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 6:48 PM UTC

I'm the author of Grafico, A Raphaël (js based SVG/VML) charting library with a focus on proper charts (per Stephen Few/Tufte) Check it out here: http://grafico.kilianvalkhof.com/ and this page has a lot of examples: http://grafico.kilianvalkhof.com/documentation/index.html

It doesn't have pie charts, because pie charts are a tremendously bad way to visualise data. I have barcharts with negatives though :)