What powers Google Charts?

Question

Does any body know what powers Google Charts? I have been using it for a while but not sure what Google used to build it.

Answer 1

I feel the touch of SVG there..

Maybe Internal engine to generate and work with SVG and export images as PNG images.

Any other thoughts?

Answer 2

Just guessing here: they must be using Python with some charting library and then returning the produced files. There are a few tools to do charts in Python. Matplotlib and ReportLab come to mind.

Answer 3

Probably just libraries they have written themselves, it's pretty easy to throw together a chart drawing library, but hard to do it right. So someone hacked together a custom java/C++/python library using already available stuff to be able to update the graphics of his charts easily, and then it extended.

That's the great thing about it, that you can make your own version without much effort, just change the URL and design your own flash animation of the chart. And that the data available in the graphs is easily webscraped..

Just theory, but something like this is perfect small project to do in 20% of your time.

Answer 4

Everything at google is done in C++, Java, or Python. I'm guessing the internals is probably done in one of the latter two.

Answer 5

Mathplotlib was my guess too - ( thanks "davidg" ).

SVG - got my own doubts because you don't have to go the length of server side SVG just to produce a static image. No panning or scaling required so not sure if they used SVG

Answer 6

They bought the Gapminder library for doing charts. It's a Java library as far as I know, but they don't seem very anxious to release the code as open-source.

Answer 7

What is sure is that you can do it with a Java servlet.

Eastwood is an open source implementation of the Google Chart API. (powered by JFreeChart)