When I developed Windows desktop applications I was tied to ProEssentials library which was powerful yet expensive and had weird and very limiting API. Don’t want to say anything bad about ProEssentials developers but, OMG, their API contains hundreds of properties and functions you have to go through just to find few ones you really need. Not only do many of them have strange names, but they also do very strange things))).
How do you like “ForceVerticalPoints” property? How in this World could points be vertical or horizontal? Well, it’s actually about point labels… Enough about that horror.
Thank to Flot library, charting for the Web made extremely easy yet powerful and extensible. Flot is jQuery plug-in which means you can use all power of jQuery for setting it up, passing data to it and reacting to its events. Moreover, chart plotting happens on the browser side which means your server isn’t slowed down by producing chart pictures. And this also means you can add interactive features to your chart like point tooltips, zooming, live AJAX updates or display options applied w/o page reload.