NetBurner Community Forum

Hello,

A quick question to see if anyone has attempted to use JFreeChart in a (NB core) webpage. I am guessing that this may not be possible since I believe that the JFreeChart JAR would need to reside on the core, and the JAR file is about 2MB in size.

The reason that I am asking this question is that I am looking to make a "better" plotting applet.

Any thoughts out there?

Mark

Mark

Have you looked at Fusion Charts Free? It's a Flash-based approach that marries up with JS/Ajax and promises rich graphical charts etc. - the typical footprint is much leaner than 2MB (more like ~20k for a given chart's rendering needs). Demo pages are available so you can have a look at some of it here:

http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/

I don't particularly care for it myself because it requires the Flash Player browser plug-in and that can "cloud" the user's experience with security settings, updates etc. But it's a fine solution if your user base is not a "soccer mom" (or a pit bull)

I'll pay for that, I just know it

If you can recompile the JFreeChart JAR for your specific needs you can probably trim it down considerably as well.

OR - you could use, for example, the MOD5270 with EFFS and an external SD card and have gobs of storage space. 2MB then becomes a trivial file size. The only restriction AFAIK is that linked content (NB compile time / function call linkage) MUST reside in NB program flash. All other accessed content, static or not, such as JS libs, JARs, images, databases, CSS, HTML pages without linkage, etc. can all be kept on the external flash media and are retrieved as needed by the NB.

You can even access and update the card contents via FTP, so you could deploy a GUI patch (or a total respin) by careful separation of data and presentation...

Brian,

Thank you for your expert reply. I am in agreement with you in that I prefer to stay as far away from Flash based solutions as possible. I work very hard to not even allow the Flash player on my systems. You are also correct in that I would prefer to not have my customers deal with Flash, but then again I am now forced back into the JAVA world and this requires the JRE - UGG!

The final phase (after 1st shipment of this project) of this effort will be to look into the SD card interface. I have designed our board with SD card capability. I am concerned that the SD card could possibly interfere with the A-to-D on the MOD5282, I though that I saw something to this effect. If this is the case, then I can not use the SD card on this particular solution.

I would also prefer to not mess with the JFreeChart JAR source, I am sure that this will send me into a HUGH black hole. However, I agree with you that if I could easily strip out all content except for the simple X/Y plotting, I would realize a much smaller footprint. Probably small enough to fit into flash.

What is the process for placing the HTM/JAVA content into the SD card verses the flash? In other words if all of my data gathering and manipulating routines are in flash, along with the web servicing functions, how do I reference the web content that is sitting on the SD via the main program routines?

Thank you again for the excellent inputs.

Mark