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Bug 369715

Summary:	Consider Google Charts API as charting replacement
Product:	[Technology] Hudson	Reporter:	Danny Thomas <dthomas>
Component:	Core	Assignee:	Winston Prakash <winston.prakash>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Windows 7
Whiteboard:

Description Danny Thomas

2012-01-25 13:00:27 EST

Build Identifier: Hudson ver. 3.0.0-M0

I believe JFreeChart was removed due to it's LGPL license and replaced. The charts in M0 aren't nearly as usable and IMO rather than going to the effort of shoe horning a static chart library, the time would be better spent providing interactive, rich charts using the Google Charts API:

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/index.html

The annotated timeline for instance, would make and excellent all-in-one replacement for the build trend/build time data:

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/annotatedtimeline.html

Reproducible: Didn't try

Comment 1 Danny Thomas

2012-01-25 13:26:34 EST

Oh, I'll add that a downside is that it's online only - you can't host the API yourself, so you'd still need fallback charting... I'll look at a proof of concept if I have some spare time.

Comment 2 Winston Prakash

2012-01-25 16:06:29 EST

One good thing came out of removing JFreeChart due to LGPL is abstraction of Charting functionality and exposing it as an Extension Point.  JFreechart is still available as a plugin. I have written the BIRT Chart plugin as a replacement for JFreeChart, but it is possible to remove the BIRT Chart plugin and install the JFreeChart plugin and get the exact functionality as before.
 
Could you please list the short comings of BIRT Chart plugin. Unfortunately the BIRT Chart API are not as rich as JFreechart.

I have used Google Chart for creating Hudson download statistics etc and I like it because of its simplicity. Writing a Hudson Charting plugin using Google Chart may be easy.  As you mentioned, I chose BIRT Chart mainly because Google Chart is online only.