The Google Chart API looks to be an excellent offering for developers and web front-end engineers. It provides a brain-dead simple way of putting a variety of charts into a web page, all generated by Google.
- Line
- Bar
- Pie
- Venn (really)
- Scatter Plots
There are ton of line style and color options, simple instructions for encoding the data, and a rate limit of 50,000 per day.
Read more in the announcement on the Google Code blog.
Well done, guys.
Now, can you do a web page thumbnail generator too? :-)
Posted by jzawodn at December 06, 2007 03:39 PM
a Yahoo developer praising Google? shameful. a Yahoo developer should be praising Ask.com which already generates Binocular webpage thumbnails:
Shameful? Huh?
They did a good job. What's wrong with saying that?
Oh, and where's the API for the Ask site thumbnail service? I couldn't find docs for it.
> Now, can you do a web page thumbnail
> generator too?
Come to think of, they had one, sort of. They had an open service which allowed you to turn any website into an image. Using the unofficial Google Page Creator image API you might even be able to resize that one to thumbnail size then! But, they closed down their website-to-image functionality, which was unofficial anyway (it was only meant to be used for an ad campaign which, consisting of a Flash which showed you what AdSense or something could do to your site... I used this tool for some time to generate automated site snapshots, of Yahoo.com no less http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-06-15-n10.html ...)
Whats really shameful is that we have lowered our standards to the point something that is this much of a shell can be praised in the public arena for anything other than a silly school project. Count me unimpressed (as usual for anything that comes out of google that isnt search, ads or gmail)
How does this compare to the new YUI Charts API? [http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/charts/]
I've used webthumbs (http://webthumb.bluga.net/home) to generate such thumbnails, works pretty well and free up to a point.
It's broken. Try something like
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=你好|안녕
It's not really the same, but PHP/SWF charts are waay cooler.
The Venn diagrams don't work very well. You can't label intersections and you can't do more than three sets.
Other than that, though, it's pretty cool.
Wow, that would have made my job at Yahoo easy. Unless we had a busy day that generated more than 50,000 hits, of course.
What's up with the haters?
This isn't the end-all, be-all of charts and graphs, but it is a nice, easy to use service that draws nice looking graphs.
Jeremy, have you Emprise JavaScript Charts? http://www.ejschart.com/ They use the canvas tag to create awesome charts and graphs.
The google ones look okay, but EJS Charts let you zoom, and scroll around the data, it's really awesome; something that a simple PNG can't really do.
Google has released an open web API that provides a drop-dead simple means of adding graphs and charts to web pages. I really do find their implementation to be extremely elegant and powerful. Here are some sample charts and their usage urls. Good stuff ... (Pingback)
OK JZ I have to posts for you on this topic. First: http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2007/12/11/google-charts-and-graphs/ is a nice post written by Corey on how one can use Google Charts in MindTouch Deki Wiki. Second: http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2007/12/12/google-charts-and-graphs-redux-with-a-mashup/ is a post I did today showing a MySQL and Google Charts mashup in Deki Wiki. Dig it. :-)
Someone has actually already put the API to good use, if you want to see an example of an application--it's kind of dorky but pretty cool. Really illustrates the power and simplicity of the API. Also, the proprietary algorithm they use here is amazingly accurate! It's at http://lovegraph.thefootnotes.com -- worth checking out.
I know it's not classy to double post, but I gave the wrong address; it's actually: http://lovegraph.thefootnotes.net
Sorry!
@rapidadverbssuck omg, my eyes! my eyes! that site instantly gave me a seizure and a migraine. The charts are amusing and original though. :-)
Here is a PHP class to generate and cache Google Charts.
http://www.malaiac.com/GphpChart/
Wow, Google charts are great. But.... it can only be used my a limited audience. Why do I suggest that? It's be cause the data that I'm charting is sensitive to my business or my employer. I don't feel I have the liberty to send corporate date outside our firewalls to Google.
I really which this was a set of libraries that I could put on a internal web server. It could be I'm missing something but I didn't see any what of getting the chart other than sending it to Google. On top of that you have only a limited number of request that can be made to google charts.
Other than that... Really good job. I can't say enough of how cool this is. I really like the fact that the chart is a PNG image. That is truly portable, as in I can target charts for use on the iPhone, which doesn't support the flash component in Yahoo's charts.
COOL.....Charts are easy to draw.
but web page thumbnail generator may overload their servers.
It requires lots of guts to launch such bulky service as free.
This API is great,
Google APIs are amazing,
I had implement a UI editor for Google Charts, you can access it at
http://chartgen.blogspot.com
