Greg Murray's Blog

jMaki and GWT : Kissing Cousins

Sun has been providing GWT support with the GWT For Netbeans plugin for some time now. The plugin allows you to very easily create GWT applications that can run on Tomcat and Glassfish. The plugin allows you to easily integrate servlets and other Java EE components in an IDE environment.

With my Ajax dealings over the past few years I have been asked about jMaki and GWT integration. For some time I had thought that GWT was a competing technology but I have come to realize that while jMaki and GWT are truly cousins whose marriage is in this case a good thing.

When integrating jMaki with GWT jMaki provides a well defined model for interacting with JavaScript and GWT provides a model for interacting with Java. jMaki can open up the JavaScript universe to GWT in a well controlled manner.

As a start the jMaki team would like to introduce the GWT community to jMaki Charting. jMaki charting provides dynamic charting capabilities where charts can be manipulated on the client without round trips to the server.

Integrating jMaki charting with GWT has helped us develop a really good integration strategy for GWT and JavaScript for which we created an architecture document. The integration can be summarized by the graphic below.

With the GWT jMaki integration we are exposing the charting functionality including Axes creation and updates, DataSets, and Markers through a set of Java APIs. See the JavaDoc APIs here. All the resources needed for the component are provided in a single jar file that you simply place in your classpath and include the jmaki.charting.Widgets inherits statement in your gwt.xml file. jMaki charting may be downloaded from the jMaki Charting homepage. It supports both Hosted or Web mode.

We have also created a sample application to show how to use and modify a chart. You can see the application live here.

Charting is just the beginning. We are now working on providing access to the jMaki widgets and would love to have the community get involved. Would you like to join us?

Comments

• Great job, Greg.
  Now the next logical step would be yahoo.chart ;-)

  Posted by: azawawi on December 22, 2007 at 12:11 AM

• Yahoo charts are the next step and I can't wait to start using them. I'm looking forward to working with you on them ;-)

  Posted by: gmurray71 on December 22, 2007 at 12:37 AM

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