GXChart and after Google Chart and YUI Chart Control
In 2001 GeneXus released its chart service called GxChart. GXChart is an online service that instantly creates any chart you want to visualize.
You define the chart and the GXchart server will return an image of it.
The service was created oriented to GeneXus users but anybody could consume this service.
The data, the chart type and other parameters can be passed either in a URL or in an XML file.
The simplest way is to include the parameters in the URL.
For example:
Is the following chart:
GXChart service is free and additionally you could obtain the local version in order to install the service in some local server.
More information about GXChart here
The last week Google released its Google Chart, esentially the same idea.
The point of this post anyway is not to compare GXChart with Google Chart (I think today GXChart is better)
The point is that I was thinking in a new way to render charts, a more interactive one.
Render images is not enough in many cases because we need interaction with the data.
We need a chart with client events in order to create new ways of interaction with Data. In this way YUI Chart control is using Flash in order to give interaction with charts. Obviously YUI Chart is very rudimentary in terms of charts yet. Using Images is a bit complicate achive this behavior.
GeneXus, Yahoo, Google, where is Microsoft in this game? What about the same service but giving us Silverlight charts ;)