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Interactive Charts

08.Dec.2009

For my Codebits project (more about it in the future) I needed to render some interactive line charts. We searched and experimented with some cool javascript libraries like Raphaël and PlotKit. But in the end, we settled for Open Flash Chart.

It has a really big variety of interactive charts and, specially, highly configurable and customizable. However, the main advantage was Ruby on Rails plugin integration. OFC2 4 Rails makes creating charts as simples as this:

# From http://openflashchart2.sentor.pl/chart_examples/line

class StatsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @graph = ofc2(650,300, 'stats/line')
  end

  def line
    title = OFC2::Title.new( :text => action_name.humanize )
    line_dot = OFC2::Line.new( :values => [9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1,12] )
    chart = OFC2::Graph.new
    chart.title= title
    chart << line_dot
    render :text => chart.render
  end
end

# In stats/index.html.erb
<%= @graph %>

A great and helpful find. What do you use for presenting charts in web applications?

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