ICEfaces Meets Fusion Charts
January 21, 2010 at 2:01 pm 5 comments
Well, we have gotten a basic introduction into ICEfaces and creating a Facelets Project.
My first task I was asked to do was implement charts within our ICEfaces project. Having just joined the project they felt this would be a good learning curve so excuse me if these posts jump from basic introductions to a bit more complex topic.
ICEfaces Built-In Charts
Firstly, just to note ICEfaces does implement their own Charting libraries. A typical example of creating a simple chart in ICEfaces is as follows:
<ice:form>
<h3><ice:outputText value=” Charts”/></h3>
<ice:panelGrid> <ice:outputChart type=“pie2d“
chartTitle=“Liyaqat’s Chart” yaxisTitle=“Years”
xaxisTitle=“Sector”
xaxisLabels=“IT, HR, Finance”/>
</ice:panelGrid>
Fusion Charts
The built in charts look generally OK and do the job quite well, however our team has decided to use Fusion Charts (http://www.fusioncharts.com). So how does Fusion Charts work?
Again, I have just started using this technology so please excuse me and feel free to comment below. As far as I understand how it works is as follows. Fusion Charts provide you with a jsw file (that uses Adobe Flash 8) and you would simply add this jsw file to you project the same way as you would add an image. This .jsw file is kind of the “chart generator”, what we would then to do is within our XHTML (or anyother scripting page) we would send the parameters to this jsw file and this would return a nice looking chart based on our input parameters.
Sounds fairly simple, but then again we always know things that are simple are not always that way. Now let me try and get some charts generated and I will get back to you with some samples.
Blog Soon!
</ice:form>
Built-In Charts
Entry filed under: ICEfaces. Tags: Fusion Charts, ICEfaces.
1.
Aziz Hendricks | January 28, 2010 at 10:00 am
Hi,
As far as I understand, Fusion Charts relies on Flash to render its charts.
This means that there is a serious limitation on Mobile Devices as most devices out there can’t do Flash in a Web Browser.
Devices like the iPhone, iPad etc don’t even have flash in their browser and the Windows Mobile devices are still struggling to get a decent web browsing experience without flash thrown into the picture.
Is there anything that Fusion Charts provides to bridge this gap?
Maybe a JPEG generator?
2.
Liyaqat | January 28, 2010 at 10:05 am
Hi Aziz,
Yes I agree with you, using flash does have its limitations and particularly around mobile devices which many of us see as a huge market.
I have not done much recent into any alternatives Fusion Charts offer but in my initial post where I used the ICEfaces charting library, this could be a possible alternative as I am aware of work being done by ICEfaces in the mobile area and particularly around the iPhone.
Thanks for the feedback.
3.
Aziz Hendricks | January 28, 2010 at 10:18 am
Thanks, it would be useful, and possibly pioneering if you could blog about a technique to apply Fusion Charts to Web Browsers on Mobile Phones.
Im sure if you spent some time on it, you could come up with a solution that doesn’t require people to rewrite their Fusion Charts code, maybe something that can get the Fusion Charts Flash to render static JPEGs, you could even contribute to the Fusion Charts API.
4.
Aziz Hendricks | January 28, 2010 at 10:20 am
http://blog.fusioncharts.com/2009/05/export-your-charts-as-images-or-pdfs.html
I see its already been done. You can add an Export Handler either Server Side or Client side to render a JPEG.
5. ICEfaces Meets Fusion Charts – 2 « Liyaqat Mugjenkar Online | January 29, 2010 at 9:45 am
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