

Highcharts 3.0 Beta released - afshinmeh
http://www.highcharts.com/component/content/article/2-news/53-highcharts-3-0-beta-released

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Frozenlock
There's also Flotr2: <http://www.humblesoftware.com/flotr2> and Envisionjs:
<http://www.humblesoftware.com/envision>

Which are FOSS.

~~~
bernardom
Google Chart Tools is also quite nice: <https://developers.google.com/chart/>

Actually, this is a perfect time to ask: I've been trying to find the best
FOSS charting tool for a (for-profit) RoR app I'm building. Google-visualr
seems to be the easiest to use: <https://github.com/winston/google_visualr>

I made a list of other possibilities here: <http://bernardomenez.es/graphing-
on-rails>

Any tips on a good gem/framework to use for an RoR newbie would be much
appreciated...

~~~
stadeschuldt
There is morris.js: <http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/> It has been featured
in a railscast: <http://railscasts.com/episodes/223-charts-graphs-revised>

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bunkat
I'm not sure how to get excited by this. Seems weird that customers had to
wait until version 3 to get a bubble chart and some basic animation events
(though it seems you are still on your own to figure out the transitions).
After using d3, charts built like this just feel so limiting and a bit old
fashioned - I think it is a testament to the amazing work that Mike Bostock
has done.

~~~
ShirsenduK
As a customer, having few fancy charts isn't that important. But the ease with
which allows customizations and the support it provides is more important.
D3.js, GoogleCharts, Flotr2, etc. are too complex to customize. When it comes
to building a product and not care about how to get your charts done,
Highcharts is the best solution.

~~~
bunkat
I think this is a common misconception. Once you wrap your head around d3,
building charts is just about as easy as figuring out the required
configuration for a Highcharts chart (even complex charts are generally only
30 lines of code). If you really don't care how it is done, there are
solutions like nvd3.js that have created prepackaged charts. Based on the
extremely limited customizations available and poor performance
characteristics, along with the pricing model, I don't think I can agree that
Highcharts is ever the best solution.

~~~
Cthulhu_
> Once you wrap your head around d3

Key point here. Highcharts' customers are companies and website builders that
don't have, get, or take the time to wrap their heads around D3, they just
need to chuck a graph or two on their site(s), then move on to the next thing.
It's not idealistic, but it's the reality.

I'm personally surprised there's not a lot more commercial JS libraries like
Highcharts out there, seems to me there's a big market for those.

~~~
jmelloy
Also, D3.js doesn't work on IE, which is a non-started for our app. We're
currently evaluating and will probably end up using Highcharts.

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bobsy
Visiting the site gives this error.

jtablesession::Store Failed DB function failed with error number 1226 User
'highcharts' has exceeded the 'max_updates' resource (current value: 36000)
SQL=INSERT INTO `jos_session` (
`session_id`,`time`,`username`,`gid`,`guest`,`client_id` ) VALUES (
'8cre30vqdh3ip8hh0iebn7buq5','1361463112','','0','1','0' )

Googling jos_session reveals the site is built using Joomla..

Should probably consider doing something about this.

~~~
kbutler
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.hig...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.highcharts.com/component/content/article/2-news/53-highcharts-3-0-beta-
released)

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verelo
High charts is AMAZING! I'm a strong supporter of not building things like
charts yourself, and have been recently astonished by the amount of custom
styling you can apply to Highcharts without modifying any of their code, and
keeping your code perfectly clean.

Cant tell you how much i love this product, leaves every charting package i've
ever touched in the dust. Keep up the great work!

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ShirsenduK
The most usable charting solution keeps getting better.

~~~
lucisferre
If only it had the most "usable" pricing structure too:

<http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html>

One price for a "web page" that's not a "web application" and then pricing per
developer? Just ridiculous. Why not add a per CPU surcharge while we're at it?

~~~
ricardobeat
What's the problem? Per-seat licenses are nothing new, it's how you have
always bought Adobe/Microsoft/Autodesk/etc software.

Use d3 if you don't want to spend the money, it's much more powerful anyway.

~~~
damoncali
The problem is that it's on a website, and the number of developers can change
from day to day.

~~~
ricardobeat
The license is not personal, so if another developer comes along he can take
over without a new license.

~~~
damoncali
It says "each person". I think I understand what they mean, but honestly, I'm
not sure. For small teams using contractors, this is really unclear.

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mootothemax
What about the other side of this, generating the series data?

Are there many - or any! - general-purpose libraries one can point at a
database, choose or write an SQL statement, and it will take care of time and
date ranges for you?

~~~
chenster
How about drawing charts based on a datagrid that is populated from database
like this? [http://phpgrid.com/example/phpgrid-phpchart-integration-
with...](http://phpgrid.com/example/phpgrid-phpchart-integration-with-live-
example/)

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bhauer
Congratulations, it looks great. Nicer than Flot.

For my purposes, I'll stick with Flot since its free of licensing fees (at
least as far as I can tell). But if I had a budget to work with, Highcharts is
appealing.

~~~
jim_h
I wish it was more affordable too. I believe it was only $100 a couple of
years ago. That was almost OK as a price to try it out, but the current
pricing puts it out of my range for now.

~~~
chenster
It's lowest price is $80 but doesn't include a developer license (another
$360) and only can be used on a "simple webpage" not a web application. The
last part is confusing. What exatcly does it mean by "simple webpage"? Does it
mean a static web page? If I'm building a ecommerce website, I guess I can't
use it?

~~~
TorsteinHonsi
These questions and more are adresssed in the FAQ:
<http://shop.highsoft.com/faq>

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aviswanathan
Funnel is a big one. I don't think anyone else has this (besides D3 - but you
can do basically anything with D3).

~~~
Silhouette
They seem to have a very broken presentation of the funnel, though. The
example looks more like they've squashed different area sizes into a fixed
funnel shape, rather than showing how much the funnel narrows at each step so
you can immediately see where you're losing or converting a high proportion of
prospects.

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Torn
Anyone know what they use to generate their api documentation at
<http://api.highcharts.com>?

I'm guessing it's built from jsdoc-style comments in the source, but haven't
come across js docs that look as good as these

~~~
ahsteele
I'm not sure either, but decided to ask the question on Programmers.SE:
<http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/187915/3270>.

~~~
wschalle
I'm actually writing a php code generator to generate an api wrapper for
highcharts, and I was really curious about this as well. The interface looks
homebrew, but I'm just not sure...

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webmonks
Here is an High Performance HTML5 based Chart that can render 100,000 data
points in just over 100 milliseconds!

<http://canvasjs.com/>

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alexpeiniger
Cool, we are using Highcharts for years at quintly. Great to see that they are
making progress.

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jimzvz
This error is rather worrying.

 _jtablesession::Store Failed DB function failed with error number 1226 User
'highcharts' has exceeded the 'max_updates' resource (current value: 36000)
SQL=INSERT INTO `jos_session` (
`session_id`,`time`,`username`,`gid`,`guest`,`client_id` ) VALUES (
'','1361463235','','0','1','0' )_

------
HugoDias
jtablesession::Store Failed DB function failed with error number 1226 User
'highcharts' has exceeded the 'max_updates' resource (current value: 36000)
SQL=INSERT INTO `jos_session` (
`session_id`,`time`,`username`,`gid`,`guest`,`client_id` ) VALUES (
'mbh4nviu3hiahjlihcodeib9c0','1361463774','','0','1','0' )

