December 6th, 2007
Need charts for your website? Google makes it easy!
Today Google released the “Google Chart API” which makes it dead simple for people who need charts on their website to create them. By crafting a URL that describes the type of chart you want, Google will provide the corresponding image. What’s the catch? Well, if you can call it a “catch”, the cap is 50,000 generated charts per user per day — that’s a little more than one every two seconds — and if your project would be just as happy showing cached images, nothing stops you from storing locally.
For example, this URL:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:ATSTaVd21981uocA &chco=224499&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec|1:||50|100&chm=B,76A4FB,0,0,0
will produce this:
This is a pretty cool, but it lacks a lot of really powerful features that you can get using other tools. Philipp makes a great point that shouldn’t be overlooked though — don’t assume that Google will add features over time, or that this service will exist forever. Google has a history of pulling the plug on projects for various reasons — and it’s hard to imagine what the business model for this one is. Google’s basically just offering up free CPU power and bandwidth for charts without any chance of recovering their costs.
I will probably use this API for at least one project I am working on, but I will definitely monitor the progress of the API and develop my application in such a way that will make it easy to replace Google’s charting API with my own if need be. What do you think? Will this new API be useful to you?
Garett Rogers 
is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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