Vaadin Charts 1.1 - For Vaadin 6

Earlier this year we launched Vaadin Charts 1.0. It has already become the way to do charting in Vaadin 7, but it was missing the support for existing Vaadin 6 applications out there.

Now, this has been fixed and Vaadin Charts 1.1 includes support also for the older version of Vaadin Framework, now including Vaadin 6.8 series.

To test it with your application, download the zip from the Vaadin Directory and follow the instructions. You’ll also find instructions for Maven there, but please note that you should use different artifact id for different versions:

	Vaadin 6.8.x	Vaadin 7.x
Maven Artifact Id	vaadin-charts-vaadin6	vaadin-charts

Implementing the charts is as easy as ever. To test it in real life, we updated an old web reporting application made with Vaadin 6 to use Vaadin Charts (it was using a custom Flash based graph library). The results look even better than before and we don’t need any browser plugins anymore!

Introducing new chart types

In addition to Vaadin 6 support, this release also features a couple of new ways of visualizing data. Here is a quick tour of the new chart types:

Box Plot

A box plot visualizes groups of data by their five point summaries: minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile and maximum. Combined together with a scatter plot it can also show outliers.

Bubble chart

With Bubble charts, you can plot three-dimensional data in an X/Y diagram with sized bubbles.

Color threshold

Color thresholds allow you to give a specific color to data below a certain value. This gives quick visual feedback for monitoring to make sure values stay above (or below) a certain threshold value.

Error Bar

With error bars you can show a secondary series that lies on top of a parent series to display the possible error range of each parent data point.

Funnel

Typical in sales funnel visualization, the funnel chart gives you a way of presenting data sets that show some kind of causality or conversion.

Waterfall

With waterfall charts you can present the cumulative effects. For example income and expenses, or other similar data. A point can either be positive or negative, an intermediate sum or the total sum.

Upgrade your charts

Take advantage of the latest features and start your free Vaadin Charts trial from Vaadin Directory. Even if you are not purchasing immediately you can try it out for free. There is a good chart index and source code examples available to help you to get started.

And last but not least: let us know what you think. Post to the forum or comment directly to this blog post.