I was searching for a fast and modern graphing framework for server-side image generation (ImageMagick == too much hassle, too many weird dependencies, bitch to set up on OS X) and found Cairo, which looks like a great alternative.

It's used for the GNOME desktop environment, and Mozilla will use it for various rendering tasks in their Gecko browser engine, but it also has bindings to most important scripting languages (notably Ruby and Python), almost no dependencies, generates PNG images out-of-the box, and seems quite well-designed.

Links

• Cairo homepage
• Wikipedia: Cairo (graphics)