Question

First, I am a final year student. We are creating a KPI and we saw JFree chart can be used to display charts. Now we have a problem about deciding whether the software is web based or not (Major votes came for a Desktop application. Only 1 is there for web based solution. ).

However, this what we have to do;

1. Display data using Charts
2. Colors of the areas of the chart MUST change during run time (eg: if < 90% attendance ‘RED’, if > 90% attendance ‘GREEN’)
3. When the user clicks on the particular area of the chart, display all the relevant data as a ‘Tool Tip Text Box’ or something. When mouse over, display some summary.
4. There will be 6 KPI’s in the dashboard.
5. KPI’s are belong to 2 categories, HR and PROJECTS.

Now my question is, what is the easy way of doing it? Web Based or Desktop? Will JFreeChart support these functions when it is in web? Please help!

Answer 1

First the long answer, then the short one. If you are using JFreeChart on the web, you have two options:

• Display the charts in an applet, which will allow you to do basically all the stuff that JFreeChart supports, including the ones you mentioned above.
• Use JFreeChart on the server side to generate images that will be served by the server. In this case, #2 will be difficult because you will have to refresh pages, #3 will be very hard or even almost impossible

Given the above, the short answer is: I suggest you build a desktop application, it will be easier to deal with charting.