Third Party Bar Chart tools

[Michael K. Wilson]

Hello there,

Am researching 3rd party bar chart / libraries and tools which support Java integration...

These are the features that I am looking for:

- Must support line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts. Additional graph
types would be nice but not mandatory.

- Graph presentation must be HIGHLY customizable. Colors, fonts, etc. CSS
styling would be a big plus.

- Must be cross-browser compatible.

- No dependencies on Flash, Java applets, etc. would be a plus.

- Easy integration with GWT-EX would be a big plus.

- Must at the very least be able to co-exist with GWT-EX.

- May be either client-side generated (Flash, Java applet, JavaScript, etc.)
or server-side generated (GIF output).

- If server-side generated, must have acceptable performance under high
load.

- Must have reasonable (cheap!) licensing price.

Michael K. Wilson

[Ulf Dittmer]

That's a tall order! I'll mention a few I'm familiar with.

The commonly used Java libraries are JFreeChart (probably the one most widely used), JChart2D and OpenChart2D. They all support the chart types you mention.

The usual way of using these would be to have them generate images in a servlet which then get served to the browser, either directly, or by saving the image to a file first. For JFreeChart in particular a JSP tag library is available (called "cewolf") that makes it easy to embed charts into web pages. Being libraries, these could also be embedded into applets.

Since they all create images on the server, no cross-browser issues arise.

For a leighter-weight solution, have a look at the Google Chart API or a Java servlet implementation of it called Eastwood. Those aren't very configurable in terms of fonts etc., though.

I can't speak to GWT integration because I'm not sure what you mean by that.

[Michael K. Wilson]

In regards to GWT integration, I mean having the bar charts work with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT):

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Thank you very much!