My take on jQuery charts

A while back I did a couple of posts touching the subject HTML 5 and the canvas tag. Of course I have been tinkering around with chart drawing APIs and so on, and couldn't help to write a little script myself.

I started out with pie charts, and essentially did a mashup between Jon Combes approach and Advanced Canvas Based Pie Chart by Matthew Knott, then wrapped a JQuery plugin around it.

Later I added some sidebar charts, which were much simpler to do and don't require to understand the fact that javascript does trigonometric functions in radians rather than degrees, a fact that made my brain boil when I tried to add in the labels, because I was expecting different numbers to come back from my calculations ...

I was keen on passing the chart values in as array, so I could gather data from an HTML table with a couple of lines of JS, for example. I left this out in the little demo that I mocked up, which I uploaded as a zip file as well, but I am sure you guys figure what I mean.

The whole thing is nothing new, and Plotkit or Bluff are way more advanced, but I think it's a nice little demo to read and understand, without being overwhelmed by large files of code. So I hope you enjoy it.