75+ Tools for Visualizing your Data, CSS, Flash, jQuery, PHP. Most people would agree that the old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is also true for web based solutions.
There should be no discussion – Charts and Graphs are ideal to visualize data in order to quickly deliver an overview and communicate key messages. Whatever type of data presentation you prefer or suits you data (pie charts, bubble charts, bar graphs, network diagrams etc.), there are many different options but how do you get started and what is technologically possible? In this article tripwire magazine present more than 75 Tools for Visualizing your data on a website and most of the options available will be covered. If you are aware of a tool, script etc. that deserves to be added to the list I would kindly ask you to leave a comment to everyone’s benefit. Advertisement Introduction Images says more than a thousands words. The article has been organised into the following sections. How to visualize you data using JavaScript-based solutions jQuery Sparklines mooCSSChart.
10 Awesome Javascript Plugins For Plotting Charts and Graphs. A plethora of amazing free Javascript plugins for plotting charts and graphs are now present online.
Many good charting libraries are available. The rapid increase in the availability of this kind of plugins is because of the fact that people are no longer dependant on Flash. Modern browsers and sophisticated computing has made it easy to render live data. Advancement in various vector drawing technologies like VML, SVG and Canvas has also made it possible. JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit. Google Chart Tools. FusionCharts - JavaScript (HTML5) & Flash Charts from industry's leading data visualization solution.
Dygraphs JS Vis Library. PlotKit - liquidx. PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript.
It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support. PlotKit is fully documented and there is a quick tutorial to get you started. PlotKit is a complete rewrite of CanvasGraph. It is better structured and supported. Requirements MochiKit 1.3 or higherHTML Canvas: Safari 2+, Opera 9+, Firefox 1.5+, IE 6 (in emulated mode)SVG: Opera 9+, Firefox 1.5+ (see note), IE6 with Adobe SVG. Note: Firefox 1.5+ on Linux and Windows is supported. License(s) PlotKit is copyright (c) 2006 Alastair Tse. Get/Download Below is a demo of a simple HTML Canvas example which should work in Safari 2, Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 6 and Opera 9. This is the HTML in the above demo: And the Javascript that is needed to draw the charts: If you do not see the above, this is what you should have seen: PaperJS. Paper.js — The Swiss Army Knife of Vector Graphics Scripting.
Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface. Highcharts - Interactive JavaScript charts for your webpage. gRaphaël Charting JS Library. Choice Free JS Datavis Library. Since there are many javascript solutions for graphics, the purpose of this article is to consider only those that popular among developers.
For completeness, here is a list of libraries that have been considered, but excluded for various reasons: PlotKit - has not been updated for more than 5 years;Chronoscope - website not available;Ortho - no interactive examples;FusionCharts - no free versions;ZingChart - commercial;Protovis - is no longer under active development. Rickshaw: A JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time-series graphs. Graphing Toolkit Rickshaw provides the elements you need to create interactive graphs: renderers, legends, hovers, range selectors, etc.
You put the pieces together. See Demo → Built on d3.js It's all based on d3 underneath, so graphs are drawn with standard SVG and styled with CSS. Open Source Rickshaw is free and open source, available under the MIT license. Getting Started. JqPlot Charts and Graphs for jQuery. Flotr2. Flot - JS plotting for jQuery. Use Flot to turn numbers into visual stories. From building apps to backgrounding stories, reporters work with numerical data in all kinds of ways.
It’s a practice that will no doubt increase in the future as more data becomes available all the time. But as anyone who’s tried to work numbers into a story knows, it’s difficult to convey the meaning of too many numbers to people without a visual. Even a simple line chart can help in a city budget story, for instance, while more in-depth subjects like school report cards and our nation’s budget require charts if they are to be understood. Interactivity can be a huge boon for understanding (though it should only be used when necessary, as it can quickly create clutter). Both of those examples were created with a JavaScript library called Flot, which makes it easier to plot data on charts. Flotr2 – my favorite javascript graph library. Moochart - charts for mootools. 16 JS Libraries for Visualizations.