Evaluating rails graphing solutions

I was trying out some graphing libraries for a Rails app where I wanted to show some small graphs. I researched gruff, sparklines, scruffy, SVG::Graph, CSS Graphs, and PlotKit. Ultimately I settled on using gruff despite its reliance on rmagick which is known to be fairly resource intensive. I decided I would just jot a note or 2 about each one of these options.

• scruffy - I liked scruffy a lot but it required both rmagick and builder and was larger in size and had less configurability than gruff.
• sparklines - I couldn’t quite get the graphs I wanted using sparklines but I will consider it in the future. It’s a very small library but it does require rmagick.
• gruff - Smaller and more fully featured than scruffy, gruff ended up suiting my needs for this project. I’d definitely consider using it again in the future. It also requires rmagick.
• SVG::Graph - While I could be happy with SVG graphs I ended up using the PNG format instead which SVG:Graph couldn’t do. This project also appears relatively dormant with not updates in the last 2 years.
• CSS Graphs - A really interesting idea with low overhead but ultimately CSS Graphs had far too many limitations for my needs.
• PlotKit - Though it doesn’t require a heavy-weight library like rmagick the javascript plotting of PlotKit requires sending a lot of javascript code over the web which I felt was a poor choice.