Orson Charts 3D (now in Javascript!)

[david.gilbert]

Object Refinery Limited (my company and primary sponsor of the JFreeChart project) has just launched Orson Charts, a 3D chart library for Java:



Orson Charts is not free like JFreeChart, but it has a very similar architecture and is Java2D-based just like JFreeChart. This means you don't need to worry about JOGL or Java3D complicating your deployment, there is just a single jar file (about 250kB).

The Swing-based viewer provides zooming and full 360 degree rotation in any direction, and you can export the charts to PDF and SVG using Orson PDF and JFreeSVG (included when you purchase a license). You can see some examples of the SVG output in the API documentation (scroll down the front page, probably doesn't work with Internet Explorer).



You can download a free evaluation copy of the library, I encourage you to download it and run the demo application today.

[paradoxoff]

Finally, a Swing-based 3d chart rendering engine! Congratulations!
That probably means that we will not get a JFreeChart3D, unless we write that on our own?

[david.gilbert]

Thanks!

That probably means that we will not get a JFreeChart3D, unless we write that on our own?

Yes, sorry.

You can have a free license for Orson Charts though, if you can use it, because you are one of the best contributors to JFreeChart.

[olbrich]

Congratulations David,

we are very interested in further investigations.

We are using JFreeCharts for more than 10 years and all dreams for the 3rd dimension
might become true now.

Ive got some simple but very elementary questions.

1. Have you finished a PDF Developer Manual like for JFreeCharts?
2. What about interactive item picking in 3D ? Thats very important for us.
3. What about conversion and relationships between 2D and 3D objects like
transforming a dataSet to dataSet3D?

thanks, M.Olbrich

[david.gilbert]

1. Have you finished a PDF Developer Manual like for JFreeCharts?

No, the plan is to make the Javadocs as comprehensive as possible (I think they are quite good already, but I will expand them based on feedback), and where topics need special coverage provide links to HTML pages containing tutorials. The first such tutorial is a "Getting Started" guide for the Android edition of Orson Charts:

http://www.object-refinery.com/orsoncha ... arted.html

Since we're charging a licence fee for the software, the documentation can be more "open" than it is for JFreeChart.

2. What about interactive item picking in 3D ? Thats very important for us.

We have a client that would like to sponsor development of HTML image map support (waiting for the final go-ahead), and putting in place the infrastructure for that will get us close to interactive item picking. We consider this the number one missing feature so, although it will be quite tricky to implement, we've already begun mapping out how to do it.

3. What about conversion and relationships between 2D and 3D objects like
transforming a dataSet to dataSet3D?

There is a bit of duplication between JFreeChart and Orson Charts in the data structures for the standard datasets (for example, Orson Charts defines a KeyedValues2D interface and DefaultKeyedValues2D class that is very similar to JFreeChart). That's been done to ensure that Orson Charts can run independently of JFreeChart (partly to avoid any licence complications). However, we do want the two libraries to work well in combination so there is some work to do on the conversions that you mention. Probably we'll creating a separate dataset conversion jar for Orson Charts and JFreeChart 1.0.x, but for JFreeChart 2 I'd like to explore some other options (like making a separate dataset jar file that is a common dependency between JFreeChart and Orson Charts).

If you have any other questions, or feedback after trying the evaluation, please let me know.

[david.gilbert]

Today we added a new member to the Orson Charts family, Orson Charts for HTML5:

http://www.object-refinery.com/orsoncha ... index.html

This is written using Google's Dart programming language (actually a port of the Java code) and compiled to Javascript so that it runs in any respectable browser.