There is a lot of swearing, pulling of hair and head scratching involved in learning Rails. It is nowhere as easy or intuitive as the hype makes out. Every now and then, though, you have a moment when the promise is lived up to in all its glory. One such moment for me has been adding the Google Charting plugin to the application, passing the new object my existing data and having it Just Work.

The only way it could have been improved would be if Google defaulted to an x-value that included all the labels. Other than that a lot of respect to everyone involved in providing a solution and allowing me to ignore a lot of code and get on with developing the parts of the application that are different from other web applications rather than the same.

If you haven’t seen the Google Charts API take a look at it because it is very cool and while you might not want to use it in production you can profitably use it everywhere else.