Google Visualization API

Question

Hello guys, I want a real and honest opinion what do you think of Google Visualization API? Is it reliable to use becasue when i was reading the documentation i noticed that there are alot of issues and defects to overcome and can i use it to retrieve data from mysql database. Thank you.

Answer 1

I am currently evaluating it. As compared to other javascript data visualization frameworks, i think it has a lot going for it:

• dynamic loading is built-in
• diverse, many things to choose from.
• looks really great!
• framework mostly takes care of picking whatever implementation fits the current browser
• service based, you don't need to download anything in advance
• unified data source: just create one data table, and have multiple visalizations draw from that data.

As a disadvantage, I'd like to mention security. I mean, because it's all service based, it is not so transparent what happens when you pass data into these API calls. And as far as I know, the API is free, but not open source, so I can't really check what is going on behind the covers.

I think the Google visualization API really shines if you want to very quickly whip up a visualization gadget for use in a blog or so, and you are not interested in deploying all kinds of plugins and libraries (for eaxmple, with jQuery based frameworks, you need may need to manage multitple javascript libraries that work together to deliver the goods). If on the other hand you are creating an application that you want to sell, you might want to keep more control over what components you are using, and I would probably consider using something like Flot

But like I said, I am only evaluation atm, I am not using this in production.

Answer 2

Works really great for me. Can be customized fairly easily. Haven't seen any scaling issues. No data is exposed so security should not be an issue. - Arunabh Das

Answer 3

I am currently working on a web based application that will have the Google Visualization API added to it and from the perspective of a developer the Google Visualization API is very limited in what you can do with each individual Chart and if I had a choice I would probably look at dojox charting just because of the extra flexibility that the framework gives you.

If you are doing any kind of large web application that will use charting extensively then I would not recommend the Google Visualizations API it does not have enough flexibility for a large web application.