How to create a chart/plot solution works on PC and iPad

We'd like to show some shiny charts/plots/tables for some business data. It targets PC browsers and iPhone/iPad.

Our team has experiences on ASP.NET, SQL Server Reporting Services, Cocoa Touch and some Silverlight.

We have done some research and here's possible solutions:

1. HTML5: not yet very standard and we are 开发者_Go百科lack of experience.

2. Flash: it looks like Flash on iPhone runs on some sort of virtual machine, it's not very efficient. We have little knowledge on this too.

3. Silverlight + Cocoa Touch: it looks like MS is now giving up SL. We need two times of work on GUI if we choose this. Maybe I can write some XAML parser for iOS using UIKit and Core Animation.

So any ideas?

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If you take the HTML5 route, there are a ton of great commercial and open source options available. I think your run down of technologies was spot on, and HTML5 is probably the safest route for interop. I've had pretty poor luck in terms of performance standing on flash for mobile app development.

If you go down the HTML5 route, flot has a nice permissive license, and has worked very well for me in the past:

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

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Honestly, the answer is #1, HTML5. It is the solution for things like this.

Flash is not going to work on iPad any time soon, so if that is an important target, then HTML5 is the solution.

The HTML5 canvas element is easy to learn, and is the future.

If you really do not want to use it, then a non-dynamic solution could be used. Create the graphics on the server and display them. You might check out something like imagemagick

ImageMagick & Pie Charts http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12653

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What about SVG ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics)? it's good enough for charting and already working on PC/IPad/iPhone. There are a lot of development tools too.