What is your preferred way to produce charts in a Ruby on Rails web application?

I'd like to add some pie, bar and scatter charts to my Ruby on Rails web application. I want want them to be atractive, easy to add and not introduce much overhead.

What charting solution would you recommend?
What are its drawbacks (requires Javascript, Flash, expensive, etc)?

My own option for people who need the support of multiple types of charts and rails helpers to simplify integration -

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It's based on Apache eCharts.

`gem 'chart'` makes it easy to add ChartJS and NVD3 charts to rails.

[HighChart][1] - A charting library written in pure JavaScript

Gems like [highchart-rails][2], [lazy-high-chart][3] makes the integration with rails easier


[1]:

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[3]:

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[D3][1] has become my preferred way add great looking charts to web apps. You have to do a little mroe work that some other frameworks, but the appearance and control outweighs that.

I primarily use SVG, which means no IE8, but that is becoming less of an issue.

[1]:

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The gchartrb gem is no longer maintained, it seems. The author [points][1] to these gems:

* [googlecharts](

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)
* [gchart](

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) (seems abandoned as well)


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It <strike>requires flash and</strike> isn't free (though inexpensive): [amcharts][1].

I've used it successfully and like it. I evaluated a number of options a while back and chose it. At the time, however, Google Charts wasn't as mature as it seems to be now. I would consider that first if I were to re-evaluate now.


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[Morris.js][1] is nice and open source. I would like to choose it comparing to highcharts. There is a new great video tutorial from [Railscasts][2]


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I just started using googlecharts for my rails 3 project. It is nice and clean, and seems to be the only google visualization api based gem which is alive. Others are inactive and mostly use the old google charts api (released somewhere in 2007-2008).

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I have started using [protovis][1] to generate SVG charts with javascript. My basic approach in rails is to have a controller that returns the data to be charted as JSON, and scoop it up with a bit of javascript and protovis.

Only downside, is that full IE support (Since it is based on SVG) is currently unavailable straight out of the box... However, current patches go a fair way to providing IE support, details of which can be found [here][2].


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