Dark Storm Designs

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Google recently released a set of tools to easily show graphs and charts on your websites, called “Google Chart Tools“.

They’re release came in an excellent time for me personally, since I needed some graphs done for a PHP application I’m developing for my workplace.

The good thing about this set of tools is that it’s very easy to use, it generates a graph or a chart with just a simple URL request, while passing the parameters via GET.

There is a large selection of designs that are all highly customizable and look amazing, allowing you to control every aspect of the chart you chose, from titles to colors, all available to you as GET parameters in the request URL.

Despite the highly customizable design, there are a couple of limitations to consider before you even try to use these tools.

1. Google limits your chart images to 300,000 pixels  – that means that if your graph is more then, lets say: 300×1000 pixels in size, they will not allow it.
2. If you are creating a graph, they will not automatically set X\Y axis value range for you – you will need to calculate everything yourselves and pass it in the request.

I’m sure you may find other limitations but for me, those are the 2 major ones that because of them I chose a different method to display graphs on my project.

Google also offers a more advanced set of chart tools that can create interactive charts and provide a solution for the 2 limitations I mentioned above, however, creating interactive charts is a bit more tricky and require some JavaScript skills and more time to learn how this API works.

If you are not sure which chart tools is better for you, check out this helpful page, that points out what each set of tools can or can’t do.

Bottom line, Google offers a very nice collection of charts to choose from, either static or interactive, but do not rush to use them – take a minute or two to see if the functionality of the charts works for you – do not be pulled in by the pretty graphs and cool colors, it would be a shame if you spend a couple of hours assimilating the API into your code just to find out that the end result graph will need more then 300,000 pixels and now everything you’ve done would be for nothing…

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1. 

   Piera

   This post is diverting! Keep up the remarkable work!

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   March 12, 2010 at 14:30

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