> You can run the charts through Google's closure locally

It talks to google chart server.

    goog.ui.ServerChart.CHART_SERVER_URI = 'http://chart.apis.google.com/chart';

It won't work without talking to the server.

I did not know that. Thanks for the tip. My project is more of an experiment and for personal exploration and all that. So I don't mind if it has a strong competitor.

I can't find any way to use that locally - it says

ui.ServerChart Extends goog.ui.Component

Will construct a chart using Google's chartserver.

is there some way to stop it talking to Google's chartserver?

I looked at the source for goog/ui/serverchart.js and checked the documentation(yes, in that order:)).

There is no way to make it work without going through the Google chartserver.

Isn't there a google charts js api? or does it also depend on google infrastructure (I mean except serving the js file)?

could you recomment a tutorial or blogpost or source repo demonstrating how to do this?

You can have a look at http://code.google.com/p/closure-library/. What I did downloaded the files and peeked through all of them. Closure has not been very popular with the community, but is currently running all google applications such as Gmail.