Starting Highcharts

I was looking into highcharts due to the popularity of presenting data on websites and apps nowadays. Highcharts is part of a series of JavaScript based apps that features interactive display along with HighStock and HighMaps - and they look pretty sleek.

As you highlight your mouse over the bars, a small box describes exactly what you want. And the implementation thus far seems to be so simple. I'll be working on this over the next few days to see how I can put in variables as data - the site has a way for people to get started.

But, keep in mind that on Ruby on Rails we like to compartmentalize our scripts and sources. Normally, you'd put in your head tags  (as instructed in the Highcharts tutorial:)


<'script' src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js"></'script'>
<'script' src="http://code.highcharts.com/highcharts.js"> </'script'> 

But there is now a gem for highcharts, highcharts-rails. So all we'd need is to add this gem to our gemfile and we can just plug in highchart scripts and methods into our Ajax file:


In Gemfile:
gem "highcharts-rails", "~> 3.0.0"

In app/assets/javascripts/application.js, add to the end:
//= require highcharts
//= require highcharts/highcharts-more

And then we're all set. This above example was as easy as making a new div with the id 'container' anywhere on my HTML, and using the following, copy pasted code from the highcharts example into your JQuery code:

From the look of things, we could probably put in variables in the array. This is looking like straightforward JQuery. I will definitely be meddling around here to get what I want for statistics. It definitely seems like a versatile and very powerful chart API.