Manoj Kumar Sridharan

When I was asked to implement a reporting system by one of my clients, I had a look at various charting solutions, some of my favorites are Jquery visualize plugin, Flot chart, AwesomeJS and Google chart API. If you want to know more about the charting solution please click here. After the arrival HTML5 and CSS3, drawing a canvas in your website has become really easy, but the main problem is, it is not completely supported in all the major browsers at the moment. So Jquery plays an important role for graphs, most of the techniques listed above works in the same concept. When you provide a table with the necessary data, the plugin just reads it and provides you a very nice and colorful chart. I have tried all these, but at the end I felt that there are some limitations in each one of those. As always Google charting API was the best, various charts like pie chart, line chart, motion chart, geo chart are available. They have made it very easy to access them as well. All you need to do is add few lines of java script and some pointers to access the API. The official google chart site will provide you with all the necessary information. The good news is that the charts all are animated and free to use. My favorite concept is the Dashboard, where you can add various chart in a single container and also some control wrappers to filter the results in the chart. For example if you have a slider control with various values and also 5 types of charts. The single slider control can be used to filter the results of all the charts at the same time-cool feature. So have a play around and I am sure that you will definitely like it. I will keep updating this space if I come across any thing interesting.

Some sample images of google chart