Montag, 16. April 2012

Library for making charts

For a new project I need a library for making charts. Boss says: "no flash", so products like Open Flash Chart can not be used. Google Visualization API is also not possible. So my choices seem to be the following:
  • Clientside GChart seems to have stopped development for more than a year.
  • gflot is - well - too much "plot"-like for what I need.
  • GWT Highcharts is probably ok for my purpose and looks as if it was relatively easy to use. Good, since I don't want to spent three days digging into a charts api. http://www.moxiegroup.com/moxieapps/gwt-highcharts/
  • ExtGWT is based on flash
  • Arcadiacharts seems to be ok for my purpose too. The charts look good and it also seems to be relatively easy to use. http://www.arcadiacharts.com/demos
I will try GWT Highcharts and Arcadiacharts and share my experience with you soon.

Montag, 27. Februar 2012

Great new features since GWT 2.2

It has been a while since I wrote my last post here and GWT has come a long since then. GWT 2.4 has been released a little while ago. A lot of really cool new features have been added to GWT in the last months including:
  • Support for html5-canvas. The gwtcanvas-project has been in the incubator for almost three years but now it is finally an official part of GWT. Really cool is the fact that even outdated Internet-Explorer versions are supported through VML.
  • Finally a GUI-designer has made its way into GWT. It may be not as advanced as other UI-builders but it is already a great help for internface creation.
  • Support for touchscreens as found in smartphones with gwt-touch.
  • In the early days people used "applications" that could be bought at many different places online or in a store. Nowadays they use "apps" that are sold through closed channels controlled by the big hardware manufacturers. So its not to my surprise that google added support for the "android apps marketplace" to GWT.
I have a new GWT project planned and will post some tutorials covering the new technologies that I have to learn in the course of the development.