Best graphing libraries?

[Kenneth McDonald]

There are, of course, a plethora of choices for doing graphing in Ruby
and for JRuby, in Java. I'd be grateful for opinions on the "best" ones,
and why people think they are the best.

Thanks,
Ken

 

[Chris Lowis]

There are, of course, a plethora of choices for doing graphing in Ruby
and for JRuby, in Java. I'd be grateful for opinions on the "best" ones,
and why people think they are the best.

I don't know if it is the best, as I've not tried too many other
libraries, but the ruby interface to the R-language, rsruby (
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rsruby/ ) is very powerful.

You can get an idea of some of the capabilities of the R plotting engine
here:
http://www.r-project.org/screenshots/screenshots.html

I think the large number of users and maturity of the R project makes it
one of the "best" packages for producing statistical/mathematical type
charts, but of course they tend to look a bit more "scientific" than
those produced by Gruff ( http://nubyonrails.com/pages/gruff ) for
example.

Hope this helps,

Chris

 

[Roger Pack]

gruff is all right--the killer app doesn't seem to quite exist. Google
for it, maybe it does now
You can also call gnuplot, if you desire.
-Roger

 

[Alan Chen]

There are, of course, a plethora of choices for doing graphing in Ruby
and for JRuby, in Java. I'd be grateful for opinions on the "best" ones,
and why people think they are the best.

Thanks,
Ken

I really like gnuplot. It's not particularly tight integration, with
the bindings usually
connecting via a pipe, but gnuplot itself is very mature; generates
clean plots
with lots of options to get it looking just right. Finally, it has a
multitude of output formats
including SVG - which is nice if you have needs for post-plot
beatutification, or other
enhancement.

- alan