Google
Well, this is definitely what I'm talking about when I talk about programming losing some of its mystique and non-techies being able to whip up their own applications. In this case, it's for web apps. We have so many sites making widgets to embed that someone with zero coding experience and minimal, if any, HTML experience can make a very cool web site. One thing that gets in my way at times, though, is the overhead for crafting a simple form for a site. I don't want to create a database table, forms, validation, and data access code for a...
How on earth did I miss this?! Charting is always a difficult thing to pull off, but here I see that Google has an API do it with almost no effort whatsoever! It looks like it's been around since at least last December so I'm really late to the party! Just craft a URL and you embed it like an image. Use JavaScript or server-side code to craft the URL for chart type, colors, labels, and values. It really couldn't be easier! More info: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/