consultant

Charting Library Shootout

Recently, I had to compare several charting toolkits. Amongst the charting toolkits out there, I found three different ones that suited my needs, so I put them through their paces. They were: JpGraph, OpenFlashChart and RaphealJS. Just to be clear why I left some toolkits out, here is a list of the requirements I used. The toolkit we end up using must be:

  • freely redistributable. This will be incorporated into the GPLed iHRIS Suite so a proprietary license means we can't ship charting with the software.
  • look good. Who wants ugly charts?
  • work on Internet Explorer 6 and above. There are a few toolkits out there that require <canvas< support and at least one does not support excanvas.
  • currently maintained. Many nice charting projects haven't been touched in two or more years. I'm willing to fix bugs if I need to, but I'd like to know that I'm not alone.
All three of the charting libraries that I tried fit this criteria.

After putting the three toolkits through their paces (source included), which one did we ultimately choose? Right now, we're going with RaphaelJS — we were using a Flash-based toolkit before and wanted to rid ourselves of that dependency, and, since our primary server target is Ubuntu, JpGraph's lack of anti-aliasing with Ubuntu's PHP GD library knocked it out.

I'll try to post an update if I come across anything new.

Posted on Oct. 28th, 2009 at 11:39 am | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell Someone

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Tigress - Loyal Student.

[personal profile] tigress

Hi, I've been using your services here and was wondering if you needed anyone to help put things up, like in FAQs or moodthemes. I have a lot of experience in both fields and experience in support/abuse. Maybe if this site were to become popular it would be more prsentable with my help. :)
Posted on Nov. 4th, 2009 09:33 am (UTC) | | Thread | Reply
consultant

[personal profile] hexmode

That would be awesome! I have some time to commit to this, as well. I'm going to be adding (by request) a PayPal option for upgraded accounts soon (with, for example, the Google Ads disabled).

One thing I'd really like to do is to get some of the main content up -- you know, the templates and stuff that say "fill this out". That, and get a decent design for the main site.

Anyway, email me at mah@nichework.com and we can discuss this further.
Posted on Nov. 4th, 2009 10:50 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Reply