Google Visualization API Simply Blows Me Away
I think everyone that's looked at the Google Finance page knows the really nice time-series graph that Google puts up on that page to show price history with annotations. Well, today I spent some time checking to see if it would be possible to use that in some time series viewer we're making at the Shop. Turns out, there's an entire API and widget set built around the Google Visualization API. Amazing.
The API is really pretty simple, and they give you a few reference implementations as well as the exact results you need to return for a specific query. But in essence, it's a table of data and then it's up to the widget to take that DataTable and turn it into a nice looking visualization. They even make a toolkit to bridge these to Java - which is a big plus.
The test code is simple, easy to follow, and after a couple of hours of reading, it was very clear to me that this was going to be an ideal way to partition the data-generating back-end from the front-end visualization. Oh sure, I have more reading to do, and there's plenty of coding yet to do, but my goal is to put some kind of in-memory database, backed by a SQL database, in a Tomcat instance and then put this request/response on top of that and then slap the GUI widgets in a simple web page on top of that.
It's clean, simple, and most of all - beautiful. Let's face it... the visualizations they have already done are nothing short of stunning.
So I'm going to be going down a road that I haven't spent a lot of time on - Javascript and Google APIs. I think it's going to be an interesting ride.