Bringing Visualizations One Step Closer to Developers

May 27, 2009


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At Google, many teams use the Visualization API to create charts and visualizations of their data - both for external and internal products.

The Visualization API wire protocol has been made available publicly so that anyone can connect their data on the web to the list of powerful visualizations available (from Google and third parties) since late last year.

However, internal developers at Google had access to our complete code base for implementing data sources with full query capabilities and more. We felt that the whole web community should also enjoy the same benefit, so yesterday we released a full open source Java library that lets developers expose their data (publicly or to select users) for visualizations, charts and dashboards with a fraction of the effort required previously. This is the first complete free Java package for implementing a Visualization API data source - complete with a full implementation of the API's query language - and it joins our growing list of other tools and data source implementations by third parties and Google.

While we were at it, we also took the opportunity to bring our developer community many more goodies. Most notably:
  • We're launching new versions of the wire protocol and query language, including improved security features for sensitive data.
  • We're launching a generic image chart that provides access to all our popular Chart API's charts and their options through the simple but robust Visualization API JS interface (without the limitation on data quantity imposed on the Chart API URL length limitation).
Check out the full list of new stuff on our What's New page.

We will be reviewing the Java library and many of the new features in our sessions at Google I/O. If you can't make it be sure to check out our full documentation, where we will also post the videos from the sessions.