Google Launches a Chart API
Tuesday, December 11 2007 7 Comments
Google recently released a URL API for charting.
What's a URL API, you ask? Well you open an image to a specially formatted url, and google returns you a chart. You can do some pretty amazing things with this API.
Check out these samples:
The last one was created with this url:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:Uf9a&chs=200x100&chl=A|B|C|D
The urls are a little bit cryptic as you can tell, but this allows you to use one source for charting regardless of your language or platform. A .NET wrapper is sure to spring up in the next couple days that will allow you to take advantage of this API with a more structured format.
Update: Boy did I underestimate the community. Chris Pietschmann already created an ASP.NET 2.0 Server Control to leverage the Google Chart API in .NET.
I'm wondering how they are able to handle all of this. Not only is it a lot of traffic to handle (but they're obviously pros at that by now) but it takes a significant amount of CPU cycles to generate a graph like that on the fly. How do they keep their response times so quick?
What's a URL API, you ask? Well you open an image to a specially formatted url, and google returns you a chart. You can do some pretty amazing things with this API.
Check out these samples:
The last one was created with this url:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:Uf9a&chs=200x100&chl=A|B|C|D
The urls are a little bit cryptic as you can tell, but this allows you to use one source for charting regardless of your language or platform. A .NET wrapper is sure to spring up in the next couple days that will allow you to take advantage of this API with a more structured format.
Update: Boy did I underestimate the community. Chris Pietschmann already created an ASP.NET 2.0 Server Control to leverage the Google Chart API in .NET.
I'm wondering how they are able to handle all of this. Not only is it a lot of traffic to handle (but they're obviously pros at that by now) but it takes a significant amount of CPU cycles to generate a graph like that on the fly. How do they keep their response times so quick?
Sean Chambers
12.11.2007
11:34 PM
It's obvious to me now that Google has long since sold it's soul to the devil to accomplish the quickest response times on the web. I'm convinced that's the only possible way they have an endless supply of bandwidth :)