

Ask HN: Charting Libraries? - clintavo

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.
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chrisa
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.

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ApolloRising
amcharts is the one we picked as well

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yannis
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/>

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dsimard
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/>

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gaius
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/>

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booster
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.

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keefe
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.

