Through some convoluted series of searches and blog posts I came across the newly updated Plotr graphing library. It is awesome.
Based upon that swiss army knife of javascript framework libraries: prototype, through clever trickery it uses the canvas tag to render cross browser, visually clean graphs. It is actually so flexible that I managed to twist it around into generating sparklines for my next project (see pic).
Two minor caveats:
- It requires the 1.5.1 or greater version of prototype. The latest stable build of Ruby on Rails ships with 1.5, so it’s necessary to manually update
- The actual javascript library that is called is compressed (which is good) and a separate uncompressed version is available to dig through. I ended up relying on it extensively to figure out how to drop the background color, turn off the shadow on the charts, etc. It would have been nice if this was in the readme, but it’s obvious that a tremendous amount of work went into the project so the fact that the documentation is a bit lacking is very understandable
WHAT TO DO NOW?