While working on my idea of presenting on this website also the Romanian National Bank exchange rates (very useful in this crisis time), I end up in choosing a form of visualization.

One might argue that text is good enough, but for me frankly graphs and charts are the best. So I started looking on the internet for free and customizable charting tools.

From the plethora of choices on the web I will present just a few:

1. An interesting tutorial on how to build a chart of your own – it’s the easy way to get exactly what you need done as it should be. It is quite old, but still actual, as Macromedia MX programming is still supported in Adobe CS3

2. OpenFlashChart GWT Library – very interesting, free library and highly customizable. But it comes with a big drawback : it has approx 375 Kb .. quite big for my requirements.

3. Origamy Flash graph component – amazingly nice and costly . 99$ ..

4. Google visualization – free, fast, light and with a ton of settings. They have pies, tables, charts … with really lots of settings. The added traffic isn’t much … around 30 kb per graph ( and I measured biggest one – Annotated time line ).

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