Calvin, our boss, stops by our office and informs us that all the regional managers will be coming to the corporate offices for a quarterly meeting on Friday. Since it is Monday, we should be able to meet this goal. He wants us to create a few pages for our intranet, showing things such as profit, revenue, and expenses.

"We've got to impress them," he says as he leaves. We stare at each other, simply bewildered. You mention that we just became business analysts as well as developers.

We start to work in our newfound roles. You begin to find the data that will be required. Since we are creating prototypes, we need to manually compile the data for now.

I start researching web-based charting tools and come across three main contenders: Highcharts, D3.js, and jqPlot. We will have to pay a licensing fee to use Highcharts for our company. D3.js has a beautiful gallery of available charts, and it looks like it has a very high learning curve. It appears that jqPlot has a lower learning curve and we will be building charts faster with jqPlot than with D3.js. The other benefit of jqPlot is that it does not require a commercial license.