Charts and graphs and stuff

It’s funny how things come in droves.

A good friend of mine has, over the years, written a few applications that require graphing. He has written them as VB applications and when I’ve suggested he make them as web-apps, one of his fairly valid objections is that it would be tricky to create good-looking graphs with dynamic data.

Google’s Charting API

So just this morning, the Barnacle drew my attention to Google’s new Charting API (Read the Developers’ Guide). It takes some query string parameters and returns your chart as an image.

Check it out:

Line chart with unevenly spaced data points and lines in red, green and dashed blue

Line chart with a pale blue horizontal band stretching from 25 percent to 75 percent of the way up the y-axis and a thin horizontal line ten percent of the way up the x-axis Three dimensional pie chart with May, June, July, August, September and October labels for each segment

Now that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?
Although I think the data encoding, while clever, seems a little quirky.

Flot for jQuery

And so having spotted that this morning, I’m stumbling around the net this evening and discover Flot, a charting plug-in for jQuery. This is teh awesome; just check out the examples, especially the zoom!

So, while you’re waiting for other browsers to support SVG, here’s a veritable choice of quality charting goodness to satisfy the most particular of needs.

This entry was posted in Coding, Commentary, JavaScript. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Charts and graphs and stuff

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *