Declarative Charts Generation Proposal

Hello everyone.

I'm interested in developing an extension to JCharts in order to generate
charts without the need to code everything. I'm relatively new to JCharts
and don't know if some work has been done on this topic yet.

Anyway my idea is:

1) Chart design phase
-Declare metada about the characteristics of the charts to render on a XML
file
-Have some templates about diferent charts types
-Use Jostraca (www.jostraca.org) or any other code generation tool to mix
the metadata and templates, generating a custom source code on the fly.
-Ask Javac to compile and save the class on disk for the Display phase

2) Display phase
-A user event will attemp to load the custom class (if on web app, from a
taglib) and instantiate it.
-A DataSource interface will provide the linkage to a database or other
means for getting the data to represent
-Generate the chart and place the output on a temp file or any other
outputstream.

Please give me some feedback on this. The need that start this design is
that as far as I know for generating charts there need to be a programmer to
do so. I would like to let my user to actually generate the charts they
want.

The XML metadata can be done by hand or by a GUI making it straighforward
for end users.

Renato F. Salas



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