Word up, son!

ChartDirector rocks.

ChartDirector, the flagship (only?) product from a company called Advanced Software Engineering, is remarkably good. It’s not the prettiest thing around, but I’ve been working with it extensively recently in high-intensity graphing software I’ve been writing.

This little sucker is fast and flexible. It has libraries and documentation for an array of languages; .NET, ASP, PHP, Ruby, Python, C++, Perl, and more. I’ve been dealing with it in Ruby and it’s a pleasure.

Unlike other “prettier” charting software, ChartDirector renders graphs to an image on the back-end. This is especially useful for graphs with many data points. For example, in the application I’m working on it’s not uncommon for an array of 10,000+ data points. Having to download all those data points on the client side for a Flash chart is pretty ridiculous and tedious to plot. The pre-rendered graphs don’t necessarily mean you have to sacrifice interactivity since you can throw in some smart AJAX and inline image rendering to provide on-the-fly zooming and panning.

When charting large amounts of data at once, give ChartDirector a shot.