Exploring Ploticus

I'm working on a Java web application that requires a lot of reporting functionality. Right now the reports are all tabular data presented as HTML tables or as Excel. I want to add graphical reporting in the form of bar charts, pie charts, etc which are more helpful at a managerial level. Also I want these charts to be in the form of GIFs.

For this I looked into JasperReports and JFreeChart. Although they seem powerful enough, I believe that using them might be an overkill for me. I'll first have to learn their API (which seem kinda vast) and then I'll have to integrate my reports with them.

In my search for a quick and easy solution, I ran into Ploticus. It seems like a developer-friendly application that can have a simple interface or an advanced interface depending on how far you want to push it. It's just the kinda thing I was looking for. However a bottleneck is that it is a C program. Thankfully Windows as well as Linux binaries are available; however I'm still wary of using it. I'll have to depend on Runtime.exec() and that is suspect when it comes to portability (I need to deploy my application on both Windows and Linux).

Anyways, I think I'll go ahead and try this. I'll document my progress here.

For starters, I'm thinking of creating a simple Java wrapper around Ploticus. Initially it'll be geared towards my project but I will try to make it generic.

Tags: technology:java, technology:coding Last modified 15:46 Sat, 25 Nov 2006 by AmanKing. Accessed 295 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.