Welcome to EspressChart. EspressChart is a powerful set of tools for creating and deploying dynamic charts. EspressChart makes it easy to create polished, compelling charts and to render them in virtually any environment, platform, or configuration. EspressChart includes a powerful design interface with extensive data connection tools that allows users to query a data source and to plot a chart in an easy-to-use point and click environment. EspressChart also includes a robust, object-oriented API that allow users to easily incorporate dynamic charts and the Chart Designer into applications, JSPs, and servlets. EspressChart has been certified 100% Pure Java™ and uses no native libraries, allowing charts to be rendered on virtually any platform. EspressChart can directly connect to JDBC data sources (including Excel spreadsheets) and can also draw data from text, XML files, or even EJBs. For even more flexibility, users can pass data sets to a chart directly as an argument or array. At run-time, charts can be rendered in a number of popular image formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, & SWF, or displayed in applets for full interactivity.
The EspressChart User's Guide is roughly broken into three sections. The first section covers background information including installation, architecture, setup, and configuration of all the EspressChart components. The second section covers charting basics, using the chart designer, and many of the features found in EspressChart. It is recommended that you look over this section to gain some familiarity with EspressChart's basic features and terminology even if you are planning to develop charts completely programmatically. The third section deals with programming and deploying charts. It covers the Chart Viewer applets, the Chart API, integration with servlets/JSPs, and deployment options/configurations. The API section in this guide contains an overview, some modes of usage, and an explanation of how to use some of EspressChart's features in the API. There are also two additional resources included in your installation:
This provides a more extensive API tutorial. It details specifically, with sample code, how to do many of the basic chart creation/manipulation functions in the API. The guide can be found in your EspressChart installation in the following location: <EspressChartInstallDir>/help/api_HowTo/index.html
The complete API JavaDocs are included in your EspressChart installation in the following location: help/apidocs/index.html
For sample charts, and API code (including servlet & JSP examples) look in the <EspressChartInstallDir>/help/examples directory.