Hello wicket-team,

for a project visualizing metar weather data I used wicket-charts based
on Highcharts in a former version
(http://tremel-computer.no-ip.org:8080/metarstation/). Due to licensing
of Highcharts I decided to move to Google charts, but found the
implementation in wicketstuf outdated, since it depends on the image
chart API, which is deprecated since 2012.

So I wrote a Google Charts component based on the actual API. I am
pleased with it, perhaps it could be helpful for other developers, so
I'd like to give it to wicketstuff.

It is rather lightweight, just enough Java to render the necessary
JavaScript to the page header without knowledge of JavaScript. Knowledge
of the Google API is needed to use it, it does not hide anything of the
API, it should be quite feature complete. It is based at many points on
org.apache.wicket.ajax.json and allows the user to build Java-Objects
from compact JSON-Strings too, for example look at the essential class
ChartOptions. Most of the classes are easy to understand with knowledge
of the Google Charts API, since they are counterparts of the structure
there. Only OptionHelper as container for convenience methods is a bit
clumsy, but I have a different solution as a builder with a fluent
interface in mind. gchart is actually used in a new branch of my weather
app and does it's job there well.

Perhaps you can have a look at it, if you like it, we can integrate it
in wicketstuff. The ZIP in the attachment has already the structure with
parent, lib and examples. I tried to write useful JavaDoc and some basic
unit tests. The example is a quickstart giving two charts on one page,
first one simple like Googles's Getting Started, the other more complex
with a overview how to use the lib's features.

Three issues (see TODO lines integrated in the source) are existing, but
two are small, not blocking. The essential one is if the rendering of
JavaScript in Chart#renderHead(final IHeaderResponse response) is
sufficient for refreshing the chart by AJAX, I am not sure if. You can
decide this in a second, I believe, and give me some hints to make the
chart AJAX ready.

I first wrote to Martin Grigorov since he helped me long ago to
contribute a bit to wicketstuff. He told me he is on vacation and I
should repeat the mail to the list.

Dieter Tremel

-- 
Tremel Computer                    http://www.tremel-computer.de
Dieter Tremel                      mailto:tre...@tremel-computer.de
Rebenring 16                       Tel +49 871 9357080
84032 Altdorf                      Fax +49 871 9357081

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