Many a web application can be enhanced with a decent graph to show data. Unfortunately out of the programming languages / frameworks that we have available to us, none seem to be very forthcoming with decent graph components, and it is left up to third party solutions to provide the necessary. From my hunts around the web the following showcases some of the better options. I’ve tried to keep these limited to the open source / free options.
LibChart
http://naku.dohcrew.com/libchart/pages/introduction/
Libchart is a simple PHP charting component, and it is totally free free free! The project is an ongoing one - with the last release in April 2008. If you are a PHP coder, you’ll love its simplicity.
Currently supports:
- Bar charts (horizontal or vertical).
- Line charts.
- Pie charts.
- Single or multiple data sets.
- Compatibility with PHP 5.
PlotKit
http://media.liquidx.net/js/plotkit-doc/PlotKit.QuickStart.html
Primarily for Barcharts and Piecharts, plotkit uses some fancy Javascript, SVG and Canvas to do some wonderous things. Both these formats are gaining traction in the javascript community, and with implementations in major browser engines, we are deffo going to see more useful javascript drawing libraries cropping up over time.
FusionCharts Free
http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/
Fusioncharts offer some of the best animated flash charting components on the web, and luckily for us they also offer free components. Not only are they used commercial with clients such as Oracle, Microsoft and Dell amongst others, so you’d be in good company. FusionCharts Free can be distributed for free with your free or commercial softwares, irrespective of whether they’re open source or closed source. Hurray!
Chartpart
Google’s chart drawing API is pretty useful. More so when a little website generates and previews a chart automatically for you. Mighty useful.
Simile Widgets
http://code.google.com/p/simile-widgets/
The Simile project at MIT stands for Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments, with alot of their work focused on visualising digital assets. Luckily for us, they have open sourced some useful widgets on Google code. The timeline is of particular interest, as it allows you to plot events as well as data, which can give some pretty cool results.
Simple Accessible Charts
http://grassegger.at/xperimente/charts-daten-semantik-css/
Inspired by some of the work done by ThinkVitamin - Out of all of the graphing solutions presented here, this is by far the simplest. HTML and CSS charts. Great if you are short on time, and need an easy bar chart.
AmCharts
Created by the talented Antanas Marcelionis Amcharts offer both a commercial charting solution and also offer a free linked version of their flash charting components. The project backups great components with even better documentation, with data (as you would expect) being pulled in via an XML file. They aso offer easy to use server side ASP.NET controls - which make the implementation even simpler for those of us who use the framework.
Features:
- Stock
- Column and Bar chart
- Line and Area chart
- Pie & Donut
- Scatter and Bubble chart
- Radar and Polar
JFreeChart
http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
If you develop on the java platform JFreechart is a 100% Java library that is used extensively in existing projects. Established eight years ago, the project has gone from strength to strength, and is now used by 40,000+ Java developers.
The library includes support for multiple chart types including gauges - common in many dashboard applications.
Charting Component Dojo Framework
http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dojox/charting/
We covered Dojo as one of the Javascript frameworks worth taking a serious look at. Dojo has a similar implementation of graphing via Canvas that we seen used in Plotkit. It is more extensive in its offering however, with cleaner lines generated overall.
Open Flash Chart
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2/
Open Flash chart instead of XML as its datasource uses JSON, which in my opinion, opens it up for further expansion via javascript interaction. Now running on Flash Actionscript 3.0 model - open flash chart is one of the most impressive open source charting ciomponents on the Web today.
Zedgraph
Written in C# on the .NET framework, ZedGraph is a class library, user control, and web control for .net, for drawing 2D Line, Bar, and Pie Charts. You can easily implement the library in VB however with a binary download offered from SourceForge. Codeproject also offer a good example C# program for utilising the control.
Open source gauge component
http://www.digitaldarknet.net/flash/index.php?selector=dgauge
Gauge components are a new addition to many useful dashboards. These are open source flash swf files, and data passed in via javascript. Source files are not included, but these may be useful for small scale data display. There’s also a JS canvas sample available via the above link.
XML/SWF gauge
XML/SWF gauge is a simple, yet powerful tool to create attractive web gauges and dials from dynamic data.
Create an XML source to describe a gauge, then pass it to this tool’s flash file to generate the gauge. Type the XML source manually, or use any scripting language (PHP, Perl, ASP, CFML, etc.) to generate it automatically.
