Small Talks/2012/November/ZHighCharts: Integrating ZK with Highcharts

Author
Alain Galdemas & Zied Zaim @NGI Maghreb

Date
November 19, 2012

Version
Applicable to ZK 5.0 and later

Introduction

The best way to graphically represent data is to draw charts. ZK supports a few type of charts based on JFreeChart library. In this small talk, I will introduce a new component - ZHighCharts, based on Highcharts JS library which offers an easy way for users to create modern and intuitive charts.

Demo

Here are some selected demos:

More demos are available here: http://zhighcharts.appspot.com/demo.zul

Component Usage

To create a chart, four steps are required:

1. Add zhighcharts-0.2.0.jar to the directory WEB-INF/lib
2. Add the ZHighCharts component to the ZUL file

<zhighcharts id="chartComp" />

3. Initialize and configure the component in the controller

ZHighCharts chartComp;

chartComp = (ZHighCharts) getFellow("chartComp");
chartComp.setTitle("My first ZHighChart chart");
chartComp.setType("line");

4. Add some data

SimpleExtXYModel dataChartModel = new SimpleExtXYModel();

chartComp.setModel(dataChartModel);

dataChartModel.addValue("Chart 1", 0, 7);
dataChartModel.addValue("Chart 1", 1, 4);
dataChartModel.addValue("Chart 1", 2, 9);
dataChartModel.addValue("Chart 1", 3, 5);

License

The ZHighCharts project is hosted on github here. To use ZHighCharts, a valid Highcharts license is required. Note that the use of Highcharts is free for non-profit organizations, students, universities, public schools and non-commercial personal websites. To use ZHighCharts for commercial services, a valid Highcharts license is required.

More information are available here: Highcharts JS Licence.

Summary

Highcharts JS is considered as one of the best charting libraries written in JavaScript. The ZHighCharts project aims to provide a pure Java approach to use Highcharts JS in ZK projects.




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