Google Charting Frustrations

Posted by: Josh Walsh in Code.

Last week Google released its Charting API which generates PNG based image graphs for your data. The data is passed to them through a URL and returns the image data.

Placing this image tag in your HTML will generate the following graph.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

Designed for Web Applications

This API is most useful in web applications. It generates attractive graphs that work well for dashboards and reports. However, it has a major drawback when it comes to security. The data itself is passed through a URL and URL’s are not a secure method of transporting data. Imagine if you logged into your online banking site and it passed your password along like this:

http://www.your-bank.com/login.php?username=Joe&password=Flounder

This URL could be sniped and your password “Flounder” would be leaked. Passing this through as an https connection does not make a difference either.

A problem worth fixing

Admittedly, we are a little more pessimistic about data security than many of our competitors, but it is still a problem which should be fixed. Google’s graph output is the prettiest of the available products that I’ve seen, both commercial and open-source, but isn’t a viable option because of it’s intrinsic security problems.

A possible solution would be to give me an API ID, which allows me to POST the encrypted data to their server and they send the binary data of the image back which I can output. It’s a little bit more technical for the few of us who care about doing it securely, but I think it is worth Google’s time to do so.

If anyone knows of a quality 3rd party OOP graphing library (preferably PHP based) I would love to hear it. I’ve tried a number of them, including JPGraph, and Jarir Maani’s SWF Charts, but haven’t found anything with the output near as pretty as Google’s. I’d prefer not to reinvent that wheel and write our own, unless absolutely necessary.

I would love to hear your suggestions.