Last week I did a review of 6 jQuery plugins that were great for implementing charts. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a couple more alternatives that are outside of the jQuery realm, and arguably look like they could be real contenders for removing Flash’s dominance in this area, so let’s check them out:

1) Emprise Javascript Charts

Chart Types: Line, Bar, Pie, Function, Area, Scatter, Trend, Analogue Gauge, Candlestick, Floating Bars, Stacked Bars.

Emprise is a really great pure javascript solution to charting. Features include zoom, interactive charts, stackable, as well as having ajax capabilites built right in. Out of all the charting jQuery and Javascript alternatives to Flash that I have seen this is by far the most advanced. But alas, with quality comes a price. Emprise is free for personal use (with restrictions) and scales up to a $1000 license for unlimited use.

2) Bluff Graphs

Chart Types: Accumulator, Area, Bar, Line, Mini Bar, Mini Pie, Mini Sidebar, Pie, Net, Sidebar, Spider, Stacked

Back when Bluff was released I was extremely impressed by the ease of implementation and great built in options to make charts on any site a quick reality. Bluff also comes with a number of pre-defined themes for your charts that you can use “out of the box” and they look pretty darn good. I’ve used Bluff on many occasions to drive stats engines, and it’s never failed me.

Implementation wise you have two choices, feed the data into javascript variables, or tell the class to read from an HTML table of data. Both work extremely well.

3) Raphaël’s Javascript Library

Chart Types: Your imagination.

I was equally impressed by Raphaël’s Javascript Library when I was introduced to it last week. The library used SVG and VML to create stunning animated charts and pretty much anything else you can think of.

There are some stunning demonstrations on display as to the power of this library, interactive charts working just like Google Analytics Flash alternatives for example. The library isn’t built predominantly for charting applications, so you need to put some work in to create your charts so be warned. This out of any shows the most promise with where javascript and vector graphics are going in the near future.

4) JSChart

Chart Types: Bar, Line or Pie

JSChart is another pretty decent javascript alternative to flat charting. The results are actually very nice to look at, and the developers promise a very simple implementation. Data sources can either come from javascript arrays or a valid XML file. The only other things you need to do are tell the script which chart type to draw, and tell it where to draw it. Pretty good stuff for a quick win.

5) Graph-It

Chart Types: Mini-Bar

I only mention Graph-It for one reason, its ability to create mini bar graphs in a similar vein to the sparklines plugin I discussed last week. It doesn’t look that great admittedly, but you can fix that yourself.

Conclusion

One of the great things I’ve learned with this exercise is that there are some great viable javascript alternatives out there and that progress is happening all around us. I am really starting to question how long Flash’s dominance in this area will last, based on the kind of demos we are seeing from Raphaël it looks like their days are numbered. Some awesome work here, and look forward to seeing more!

Tools to help you learn…

Learning jQuery 1.3	Amazon Kindle 2	jQuery UI 1.6

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 and is filed under Development, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.