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Reviews : Review: Chart FX 6.2 (Beta) for Java :

The Charts and Visuals

What struck me first about Chart FX was the variety of charts available. Software FX has an online gallery of charts and types. These include the usual bars and pies, but also bubbles, three dimensional contours, areas, scatters, histograms, numerous stastical charts, hybrids of the aforementioned (and others unmentioned), and even maps. Yes, maps. And they're all highly customizable. You can tweak the colors, borders, add background images, set reusable palettes, and use gradients, grid lines, or stripes. The amount and variation of customization is practically endless. Version 6.2 also adds the ability for increased labeling and annotation.

Developing Charts

Charts are developed primarily through the Chart FX API. This is a set of classes that you can use to embed server-side beans into your J2EE applications, and call on the charts. From there, you can either set properties directly using the API, or you can utilize the Chart FX Designer to create XML descriptors for your charts. Additionally, Chart FX for Java integrates with Sun's Java Studio Creator so you can easily plug charts into JSF applications.

The Java API

All of the Chart FX documentation is available online, or you can refer to the locally installed version. The documentation contains a well-composed how-to documentation (the Programmer's Guide) that explains in-depth the implementation and customization techniques for using Chart FX. Additionally, you will find the full Java API docs highlighting the different charts (represented by objects, for example SoftwareFX.ChartFX.Bubble represents a bubble chart) and other objects accessible in Chart FX.

Also, a number of different data sources can be utilized. You can either bind these in directly in the code using the API, or you can use external sources such as XML files, JDBC datasources, text files, collections, arrays, etc.


Figure 1: ChartFX's Designer enables you to edit chart properties.

The Designer

As great as that may be, creating a highly customized chart or map requires setting a number of properties. This would be extremely laborious to do in a purely code-based format. Also, while, as the developer, you may be implementing the graph in your application, someone else may be responsible for designing the chart. This is where the Designer comes in handy (see Figure 1). The Designer will enable you (or someone else) to edit the properties using a basic interface of drop-downs and color tools. This then generates an XML file that the Chart FX server uses to customize your chart.

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