So you say to me: "Ah I am using gruff to address my charting needs and it's awesome!!". To this I say: "Right you are my friend". However let's color this statement a bit. Depending on your graphic needs Gruff may not be the end all be all. Of recent I have been building some applications that uses SWF Charts and I have been very happy with it. Swf charts is a rich graphing library the uses flash to render the charts. You produce a bit of xml in your rails controller and the xml is rendered on the client. Yes on the client, what a great concept. Why overload your server with rendering graphs using Rmagick when you can suck some cycles out of your customers bitchin machines ?

So for applications that need to deliver different graphs to customers I believe flash rendering is the best approach. If your application delivers the same graphs and does not require any client side interactivity then Gruff and caching is probably the right path for you.

Now if you need your customers to be able to interact with the charts and render different view based on a particular login, I believe flash charting is the better solution for you. SWF Charts offers the ability to embed links within the graphic components and you will be able to catch the link clicks within your rails controller. How cool is that ?

This particular package is free for the basic charting behavior but will cost you $45 per domain registration to enable links behavior and certain graph types. In my experience, this is money well spend. I have had great success with the support on this package too. Very fast turn around time.

I will shortly post some sample code to show SWF Chart with Rails mashup...

And Joy !!