InfoQ has just published an article written by Matthew Bass that introduces the Google Chart API and the gchartrb library, which you can use to programmatically generate URLs for use with Google Chart. It’s very easy to use this library to generate charts in your FXRuby applications. First, install the gchartrb gem:

$ sudo gem install gchartrb

def bar_chart
  GoogleChart::BarChart.new('600x200', 'My Chart', :vertical) do |bc|
    bc.data 'Trend 1', [5,4,3,1,3,5], '0000ff'
    bc.data 'Trend 2', [1,2,3,4,5,6], 'ff0000'
    bc.data 'Trend 3', [6,5,4,4,5,6], '00ff00'
  end
end

The toescapedurl method for the BarChart object returns a URL from which we can retrieve the chart image data in PNG format. We can in turn use that data to construct an FXPNGImage, and place it inside an FXImageFrame:

FXImageFrame.new(self, nil, :opts => LAYOUT_FILL) do |f|
  f.image = FXPNGImage.new(app, open(bar_chart.to_escaped_url, "rb").read)
end

The result is a nice little bar chart, as shown here:

I’ve just added a new page of links to Ruby and Rails resources. It’s primarily intended for software developers who are new to Ruby and want to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Please leave any suggested additions in the comments.