RubyConf: Dynamic Graphics with Ruby
This RubyConf 2006 session provided a quick overview of a few libraries available to create and manipulate images in Ruby. Geoffrey Grosenbach, from the Rails Podcast, provided brief introduction to Scruffy, Gnuplot, MRPlot, PNG library, and Gruff Scene.
Scruffy is a pure Ruby library that produces attractive and powerful SVG graphs. MRPlot is a pure Ruby plotting library. The PNG is a pure Ruby library put out by the Seattle.rb peeps. I found Gruff Scene a bit interesting. Gruff Scence allows you to define different versions of a set of images which depending on some given state can combine a set of images into a scene that can visualize information. And of course you can always use RMagick, the Ruby interface to ImageMagick.
Now everybody has an opinion, and my opinion is that graphs are not sexy. A bar chart on top a line graph on top of a scatter plot is boring. But my hope is to use the pure Ruby PNG library to create some cellular automata, fractals, and other ‘gnarly visualizations’, as Professor Rudy Rucker would say.
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