Web visualisations for data?

Question

I would like to display a bunch of data in a meaningful way through visualizations on a site.

I have been experimenting with RaphaelJS library, but performance on IE8 is terrible, and HTML5 canvas is still not widely supported.

So I'm left with Flash and any existing libraries.

On the flash side there seem to be many, but because of this I am a bit lost and don't have the possibility to experiment with each one.

---

( I will list any libraries that people have pointed out here. )

Flash / Flex:

• Flare
• Axiis
• BirdEye
• Flex Charting Components
• Core Components/Charting

• IBM ILOG Elixir

  Thanks ZackBeNimble (link to answer)

Javascript:

• Google Visualizations API Gallery

  Thanks Justin Johnson (link to answer)

• Google ExplorerCanvas (HTML5 Canvas for IE)

  Thanks Craig Stuntz (link to answer)

• ProcessingJS

  Thanks Bobby (link to answer)

Java:

• IBM's many-eyes.com

  Thanks Richard Inglis (link to answer)

---

Help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

If you do end up going with Flash, consider the following visualization libraries. My personal favorite is Flare, but the Flex Charting Components probably have the easiest learning curve.

• Flare - Open source, pure Actionscript - Demos
• Axiis - Open source, Flex + Degrafa - Demos
• BirdEye - Open source, Flex oriented - Demos
• Flex Charting Components - Proprietary, Flex - Demos under Flex Core Components/Charting
• IBM ILOG Elixir - Proprietary, pretty, Flex Demos under Data Visualization/IBM ILOG Elixir

Answer 2

You may want to check out Google Visualizations API Gallery (which are different from its graphing API). It's a collection of different, cross-browser visualizations. Some are in flash, others render static images. Also, some integrate with GWT.

_{(source: google.com)}

_{(source: google.com)}

Answer 3

Why not Processing or ProcessingJS?

http://processing.org/

http://processingjs.org/

Answer 4

We use Google ExplorerCanvas for IE support and then a canvas-based plot library. I've not exhaustively examine the performance, but it works well enough for us in IE 8.

Answer 5

There are some fine-looking visualisations at many-eyes.com - which I think is run by IBM. I don't know what they're using though: some kind of Java Applet...

Answer 6

How about Tableau? Tableau Public (or Tableau Server for private sites) provides a quick and flexible tool for building data visualizations that can be embedded without any plugins. It won't give you full programmatic control though - it's designed for analysts.