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. Actually, ZK supports few types of charts based on JFreeChart library. In this small talk, I will introduce a new component, the ZHighCharts, based on Highcharts JS library. The ZHighCharts component offers an easy way for a person to create modern and intuitive charts.

Demo

Here are some selected demos: More demos are available on this link: 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" />

1. Initialize and configure the component in the controller

ZHighCharts chartComp;

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

1. 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

To use ZHighCharts, a valid Highcharts license is required. Note 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 informations are available on this link: Highcharts JS Licence.

Summary

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

Comments

Copyright © NGI Maghreb. This article is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.