Bringing Visualizations One Step Closer to Developers
At Google, many teams use the
Visualization API to
create charts and visualizations of their data - both for external and internal
products.
The Visualization API
wire protocol has been made available publicly so that anyone can
connect their data on the web to the
list
of powerful visualizations available (from Google and third parties) since late last
year.
However, internal developers at Google had access to our complete
code base for implementing data sources with full query capabilities and more. We felt that
the whole web community should also enjoy the same benefit, so yesterday we released a full
open source Java library that lets developers expose their data
(publicly or to select users) for visualizations, charts and dashboards with a fraction of the
effort required previously. This is the first complete free Java package for implementing a
Visualization API data source - complete with a full implementation of the API's
query language - and it joins our growing list of other
tools and data source implementations by third parties and
Google.
While we were at it, we also took the opportunity to bring our
developer community many more goodies. Most notably:
- We're
launching new versions of the wire protocol and query language, including improved security features for sensitive
data.
- We're launching a generic image chart that provides access to all our popular Chart API's
charts and their options through the simple but robust Visualization API JS interface (without
the limitation on data quantity imposed on the Chart API URL length
limitation).
Check out the full list of new stuff on our
What's New page.
We will be reviewing the Java
library and many of the new features in our sessions at Google I/O. If you can't make it be
sure to check out our
full documentation,
where we will also post the videos from the sessions.
By Itai Raz and Yaniv Shuba, Google
Visualization API Team
