You'll laugh at me, but I think that one of the most critical aspects of a graphing library is whether it can anti-alias or not.<p>I interned with a company a few years ago and we tested graphing packages; we found that although A was superior technically to B, B was preferred by the users because it anti-aliased the graphs that it rendered. Technically it made things much more complicated, but looking better goes a very long way.
I've been using Flot a while after getting the hump about JS charting SDKs last week. A clever person I work with has ported Flot to YUI (<a href="http://github.com/bluesmoon/flot/tree/master" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/bluesmoon/flot/tree/master</a>).<p>I have to say I particularly like it, and I think we will be offering back some improvements to the jQuery version, such as the ability to have many more graphs on the page with destroying your browser.<p>I do really like the idea of Tufte graphs though. As a Tufte devotee I think I'm going to look at getting that look and feel out of flot as well.
One of the biggest problems with using Canvas to render graphs is the lack of exporting functionality. I built a reporting tool over the summer that used Flot, but ended up having to switch it with Google Charts because users couldn't copy/paste results into Word.<p>Image rendering may not be as dynamic as Canvas rendering, but the ability to export images and the widespread browser support still make it a very viable solution
Flot looks good but I'm concerned about its use of a Canvas emulator in IE (as opposed to writing natively to VML). Such things often don't work well, and we can't afford to have second-class behavior in IE.<p>Can anyone here speak to whether that is a problem or not?<p>Alternatively, does anybody have a different favorite charting library they'd care to mention?
I've had some javascript graphing pages open in the background for ages - but what data do we have that's going to be useful to graph?<p>Perhaps instead of "what data can I graph?" I should ask "What do we want to improve?" and find a way to measure it, then graph that.
I think using Google Chart API is much better than using these plugins. Lots of chart types, easy to make, gives high-quality result, and support all browsers that can display images.
It's not jQuery, but I've been working on moving LangPop.com to Flotr:<p><a href="http://solutoire.com/flotr/" rel="nofollow">http://solutoire.com/flotr/</a>