It seems every man and his digital dog these days are posting top 10 lists and i thought is about time that Revium dips their toe in this cesspool of unoriginal thought to bring you our Top 10 Web Based Charts!
As we all know there are lots of different scenarios where the use of a graph is required and the level of interaction can vary from simply viewing information to interacting with it for a more dynamic experience. My preference tends to lean towards JavaScript / jQuery based libraries for one main reason: I know how to style and manipulate css + html far better than Flash / Silverlight. That being said we have often used the Telerlik charts (in our Asp.Net projects) because they offer the option of saving the chart as an image so that you can embed it in an email or save off for later use.
JavaScript Based Chart Libraries
Highcharts
http://www.highcharts.com/
Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.
Dygraphs
http://www.danvk.org/dygraphs/
Dygraphs is an open source JavaScript library that produces produces interactive, zoomable charts of time series. It is designed to display dense data sets and enable users to explore and interpret them
Emprise JavaScript Charts
http://www.ejschart.com/
The Emprise Javascript Charts package is an interactive javascript chart that offers features like zooming, ajax driven data and axis scaling.
Flot
http://code.google.com/p/flot/
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.
Flash
AnyChart
http://www.anychart.com/
AnyChart is a flexible Flash based solution that allows you to create interactive and great looking flash charts. It is a cross-browser and cross-platform charting solution intended for everybody who deals with creation of dashboard, reporting, analytics, statistical, financial or any other data visualization solutions.
AmCharts
http://www.amcharts.com/
AmCharts is a set of Flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. AmCharts can extract data from simple CSV or XML files, or they can read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ColdFusion, and many other programming languages.
FusionCharts
http://www.fusioncharts.com/
FusionCharts v3 helps you create animated and interactive Flash charts for web and desktop applications. It livens up your applications by converting monotonous data into exciting visuals.
Open Flash Chart
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2/
Open Flash Chart is an open source chart project built using Actionscript 3 and Adobe Flex with server side herlper libraries for PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET, Google Web Toolkit and JAVA.
Asp.Net
Telerik Chart
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/chart/
Telerik is already well known in the DotNet world for their control suite. If you are after full server side integration with your charts they can be a good option.
ComponentArt Chart
http://silverlight.componentart.com/
ComponentArt is also well known in the DotNet world for their control suite. If you are after full server side integration with your charts they can be a good option.
Related posts:
It would not be a big issue if we add 11th charting framework to the list – much praised Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 which they released in 2009. It’s very feature rich and free
. It will go under the ASP.NET section.
Here is an overview: http://www.developer.com/net/article.php/3822936/Microsoft-Charts-Overview.htm
To download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en