It must be my lucky day. Earlier today I decided I needed to replace some old graphics code based on a now defunct tool. As I was browsing through my feeds today I noticed two cool things that relate:

Google Chart API

Basic charting, but dirt simple - the way it should be. I replaced my three charts in these samples in 10 minutes with graphs from Google. Yeah, they were simple bar and line charts but still the process of getting things set up and replaced was a piece of cake. The API is URL based so you tell Google what chart type, data, labels, legends etc.all with a few URL parameters. The API is easy to use and well documented. Graphs are pretty basic - it won't replace a high end graphing package but it's great for getting small informational charts into a page in a hurry.

Flot jQuery Plugin

Another tool that looks interesting is Flot which is a jQuery plugin. It's a plotting tool so it will work for line and dot charts, but it also looks real easy to use. The authors stress that it's designed with ease of use and sensible defaults in mind so that the syntax for the plug in remains simple. The output of Flot looks very slick and there's some support for interactivity that looks particularily interesting for navigating large charts that don't easily fit into a small area. Flot is small and fully self contained so it's just a small JavaScript file to distribute, plus the JS code you have to write to provide the graphing data via client script.

There are a few other free graphing libraries out there, but it's good to see a few more choices that are Web centric and appear to be easy to use. There are plenty of graphing tools out there, from the outrageously overpriced stuff from the tool vendors to a number of decent free libraries, but frankly farting around with image generation and feeding images separately through a handler can be a hassle. In most cases you end up creating a small graphics front end for charts. Both of these solutions offer a different and more direct way to graphing.