Creating beautiful charts with JRuby and JFreeChart

I recently returned from RubyKaigi where I had the opportunity to sit down with members of the Japanese Ruby community and show them a little bit of JRuby. One of the items that came up a few times was the difficulty of utilizing external libraries from Ruby: if it’s a C library, typically you have to either write a C extension or do the extra work of writing up an FFI binding. If the library is not implemented in C or Ruby, things get even weirder. One example is the Charty library, one of the more popular options for generating beautiful chart graphics on Ruby. But Charty actually wraps a Python library called matplotlib, and the bindings for CRuby literally load Python into the current process and call it via Ruby C API calls which then make Python C API calls. The horror! Also recently, a Reddit Ruby post demonstrated the use of the QuickChart library, which is implemented in JavaScript… yuck! In this case, the call-out is via process launching to the QuickChart command line, bu ... Read full article.