I was looking at creating a chart in Ruby so I started looking at charting libraries. I like the features of dojo, but the dojo documentation is kind of sparse and each quest for information ends up taking too long. Then came along the Flash charing tools of maani.us. It is in Flash (which at least for now means that you wont be able to use it for iPhone). The design of the maani.us is outstanding (it requires Flash 6 or above). Easy charts are quite easy to create, but hard things may be quite difficult to accomplish. For example, I want to create a timeline graph and would like to have a horizontal scrollbar. This is not possible directly in maani.us. I suppose it is possible to embed maani.us in a flash application. I’m still not sure which approach I prefer: Flash based or JavaScript based.
You need to create an XML file to describe your chart. I created the sample maani.us chart using this XML file. Here is the ruby program that created this XML.
