Add Powerful Charts and Graphs to Your Ruby on Rails App Using ZiYa

If you're looking to add powerful, dynamic, customizable charts and graphs to your Ruby on Rails app, consider using the ZiYa plugin for XML/SWF Charts. It's quite easy to install and best of all it's free. All it requires is a simple script/plugin install from Rubyforge followed by a couple of require/include lines in your controller and that's it.

Some of the nicest features of the ZiYa plugin are support for dynamic data (on the fly rendering) and fully customizable look and feel skins that you can create in xml. For the app I am currently using these graphs on, I created session variables that the chart action (ie rails action) would read in and from that create a graph with a customizable skin I had made to fit the look and feel of my site. All in all, it took less than a few hours for me to figure everything out and have a page load with exactly what I wanted. Thanks in part to ZiYa's website which showcases a training page that has a dynamic xml stylesheet that you can edit and see exactly how your edits change the graph's look. If I wanted to add a graph nowadays, it would take almost no time at all. And this isn't because I'm some sort of genius, ZiYa just makes it that simple!

Here are a couple of demo graphs to get an idea of how powerful the XML/SWF Charts are:
(Normally rendered in Flash with effects and transitions)

To get started, simply go to your app's root home in the command line and type: ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/liquidrail/plugins/ziya/trunk If you don't have SVN installed it won't work so make sure you do (found this out the hard way). After you install the plugin, be sure to check out ZiYa's Training, Sample, and RDoc pages.