Monday, April 13, 2009

Google Charts for GWT

For anyone interested, I have begun developing a GWT implementation of the latest Google Charts API.

While there are a number of useful GWT-based chart implementations, many of them are based in Flash or are otherwise a bit heavyweight. Although there are some that work really well and are very nice (there's a really cool-looking one for Ext GWT), sometimes you just want a simple chart without any external dependencies.

The Google Charts API allows you to create charts on the fly via a URL-based API. It returns a static generated image of your chart. This makes for a powerful, yet extremely lightweight tool. While this API is clearly exposed on their site, there does not seem to exist, essentially, a standardized wrapper for this that caters to GWT.

My implementation of Google Charts for GWT simply provides that wrapper. Certainly, if you want something flashy and dynamic, this tool is not for you, you want the heavier tools I alluded to earlier.  But for a quick, lightweight tool with a number of customizable features, give this a whirl.

It is currently in the alpha stages, meaning that it is functional but is not completely documented and may contain some weird behavior. I would like to test the implementation more aggressively and finish off the full API feature set. Right now, though, you can create Bar, Line, Pie, and Scatter Charts, complete with features for Chart Legends, Shape Markers, custom colors and chart axes, multiple data sets, and more.

Check out my Google Charts for GWT samples here (with example source code):
http://www.solertium.com/samples/charts/index.html

Download the source code and samples from:
http://code.google.com/p/gogoego/source/checkout
https://github.com/GoGoCarl/google-charts-gwt

The project you're looking for is located in trunk/modules/com.solertium.util.gwt.charts

Hopefully this is useful. I'm very open to criticism and suggestions going into further development of this project.

--
Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation
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4 comments:

  1. Check Google Visualization for GWT

    http://code.google.com/docreader/#p=gwt-google-apis&s=gwt-google-apis&t=VisualizationGettingStarted

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  2. Thanks Sujay. I did notice the Visualization API initially, but the one drawback it had was its dependency on Flash. While it was very powerful and definitely covered what I needed, I wasn't able to use Flash for my particular project, which needed to be both fast and compatible with hand-held devices. Thanks for this, though!

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  3. I implemented a couple of projects using GWT, GAE, and Google Charts API and was pleased with the Charts API. I wrote a little blog article about it too:

    http://www.fishbonecloud.com/2011/07/google-charts-api.html

    I tried the GWT Visualization plugin and decided that the charts looked a little better with the HTTP based charts api, so I went with that. Cheers!

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  4. Is there still activity on this projekt? What is the latest functioning version?

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