Kickass HTML5 SVG Charts
December 03, 2011
Let’s face it, most charting libraries suck. Often times the default charts look awful. You need to set seemingly hundreds of options to get something that looks halfway decent. Other times the api is wonky. You might have to do extra work to 0 pad or transform data into an intermediate data structure (I’m looking at you Google Visualizations).
It’s 2011, charts should look good by default, not require developers to do extra data transformation and (gasp!) work in IE. But after looking around for a charting library that could do all three of these things (well) – I was left found wanting.
Lacking a good solution, I decided to write my own open-source charting library – Raphy Charts. Raphy Charts draws vector charts in SVG and is built ontop of the excellent Raphael – it even works in IE due to Raphael’s fallback support of VML. Time series (line, bar) charts, smoothing, tooltips, axis labeling, and sparklines are all currently supported, and I have many more features planned for the near future.
The best part is Raphy Charts is open source and super easy to setup.