Flot is an interactive charting library for jQuery that renders line, bar, pie, and time-series plots with zooming and panning. It provides interactive plots for engineering and scientific data with customizable axes, scales, and series styles, and supports real-time data updates. The library is built as a jQuery plugin with a canvas-based rendering pipeline and a plugin extension system that allows third-party code to add new chart types, interactions, and data transformations.
The library distinguishes itself through a broad range of specialized chart types, including candlestick, bubble, radar, Gantt, waterfall, and pyramid charts, alongside standard bar and pie charts. It offers chart animation on load and horizontally, a mini-map navigator for panning and zooming, multi-touch gesture support, and navigation controls. Flot also provides real-time data updates, dynamic resizing, series visibility toggling, and tooltip display on data points.
Additional capabilities include time series data visualization with time zone support, line chart downsampling for performance, percentage stacking of series, series aggregation, and image export to PNG, BMP, or JPEG. The library is extensible through its plugin system, which can add new chart types, interactions, and data transformations.