Revium’s Top 10 Web Based Charts

Mark Wiseman — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:52:34 +0000

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.

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Is your web site cross browser compatible?

Evgeny Petrov — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:59:34 +0000

This is a question that every web developer asks themselves when preparing to launch a new website. More often than not, there are specific requirements from a client to support certain web browsers (the most common being IE7, IE8, Firefox and Safari). It’s not uncommon however, for some of the more conservative client types to request compatibility with IE6 (shudder!) or Opera.

The real question is “How important is it to support as many browsers as possible? Is it really beneficial for you website or is it a way to turn development into a nightmare with no way out?”

I’ve recently analysed IIS logs of the electricity retailer web site Simply Energy and was surprised how many old and/or extremely rare browsers people use for their everyday web browsing – IE4, IE5, Netscape 4,5, multiple Mozilla 3 compatible browsers, Konqueror, GreenBrowser, SlimBrowser, SeaMonkey, Avant browser and IE9 all come into the mix (although some make up a very marginal number!)

With this variety, it’s impossible to ensure complete compatibility with every web browser. However, with the advent of the W3C (World Wide Web Consurtium), we know that building according to their guidelines and recommendations can ensure maximum compatibility across most common browsers.

So really, what is the answer? Well, I guess there is no definitive answer. Where do you draw the line with cross browser compatibility? It’s really an open ended question and I was hoping that this may generate some discussion – There is always going to clients that have bizarre requests in terms of cross browser requirements!

Happy for anyone to post comments here!

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