How to build a Gantt Chart with the Google Charts API
The Google Charts API is an excellent way to add high quality charting to your web application. We first started working with the API as part of the Simpli5 dashboard development, and were quite impressed with its functionality and ease of use. Wrapper classes were developed and added to our Sandstone Application Framework to make the addition charts to Simpli5 and other applications as simple as possible.
An application we are developing for a client requires some graphic representation of progress along a timeline of multiple steps. A Gantt Chart is the obvious best solution, but alas that is not a chart type available from the Google API. However, a Gantt chart is really just a special type of bar chart, and bar charts are available in the API. So the question was, how can we make the standard Google bar chart display as a Gantt?
The Google Charting API Developer’s Guide does an excellent job documenting the “how” side of things, so to avoid repeating a lot of stuff from there, we’ll just focus on the “what” of building a Gantt chart with Google.
Google Chart’s Resolution
A few days ago I posted my frustrations with Google’s charting API security. While I still believe there are some issues that would plague banks, government and other institutions that have highly sensitive data, I have found a solution to our problem.
Google Charting Frustrations
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.
Worldmapper – Trending the globe
I am fascinated by the different ways people represent data. We grow accustomed to displaying data in the same old ways. We start to glance over the mundane bar graphs we see everyday. We forget that the relationship between the data is more important than the specific numerical values. Graphs are for trends, reports are for numbers.
Worldmapper takes the same old data we hear every day in the news and dares to present it uniquely. I think it makes their point well.
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