Ruby Charting Library

Charts library for Ruby

I've made a number of useful charts with the Google Chart API. There are a few gems: googlecharts, gchartrb. I haven't used them but they look like a good first cut.

As to not displaying it you can just make the call and save the result. No need to render, just make the call, get the URL, and fetch the file.

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

Google Charts is an excellent choice if you don't want to use Flash. It's pretty easy to use on its own, but for Rails, it's even easier with the gchartrb gem. An example:

GoogleChart::PieChart.new('320x200', "Things I Like To Eat", false) do |pc| 
  pc.data "Broccoli", 30
  pc.data "Pizza", 20
  pc.data "PB&J", 40 
  pc.data "Turnips", 10 
  puts pc.to_url 
end

ChartKick library hash doesn't work

It appears that I have made a mistake somewhere in my code that was conflicting with the javascript file from working. Honestly, I'm not quite sure what I did differently since I've been trying different things. As it stands I have //= require Chart.bundle before //= require chartkick in my application.js file and i have Chart.bundle.js in my vendor/assets/javascripts folder. It seems this is all it took and all seems to be good now. I believe i may have had conflicting code somewhere and just missed that conflicting code while looking through what I had.

Ruby on Rails Pie Chart Library?

Yes, Gruff is pretty cool for this.

Candlestick/Financial Charts in Ruby

The google chart API supports candlestick charts, among other things.

There are a few gems that automate this: googlecharts, gchartrb. I haven't used them but they look like a good first cut.

Here's a quick example from the docs:

Candlestick example:

Drawing Library for Ruby

The simple answer is that (at time of writing) what you want almost certainly didn't exist. Sorry!

If you're Windows-based then I'd look for a product in the .NET space, where I expect you'd find something. You're probably going to have to pay real money though. I suppose, if you're brave, you may be able to talk to it using IronRuby.

From a non-MS environment I would be hoping for a Java-based solution. As already mentioned, within the Web world, you're going to be hoping some something JavaScript-based, or probably more likely, something from the Flash (or maybe even Silverlight?) world.

Actually, if you want to stay in Ruby and don't mind some risk, Silverlight might be a way to go - assuming the DLR stuff actually works (no experience here). Ruby - much as I love it - hardly has the most mature GUI structure around it.

Update: Since writing this (approaching 5 years ago) the situation has improved - a little. While I'm still not aware of any specific Ruby graph-drawing libraries, there is improved support for Graphviz here (Github) or by gem install ruby-graphviz. I've found that for simple graphs, it's quite possible to write the script directly from Ruby.