Today, Greenplum and SitePen announced the contribution of the new Charting engine to the Dojo Toolkit. Originally designed as the foundation for the Greenplum Monitor--a browser-based database monitoring application to be released later this year--the Charting engine is a cross-browser way of creating very complex charts easily, that can be updated on a regular basis. Some of the features include:

• A Chart can have multiple "PlotAreas" (the actual charts)
• A PlotArea can contain multiple Plots (x/y axis + N data series)
• Data series are bound at run-time to a dojo.collections.Store object, with flexible field bindings.
• An Axis can have custom labeling schemes.
• See below for plot types.
• Each plotter can take a function at render, which will be called for every data point in that series--the node representing the point is passed, as well as the entire source object the point represents.
• PlotAreas provide a facility for assigning colors to series (basically it has a built in HSV generator)
• All browsers but WebKit are supported in full.
• Rendering can be granular; right now the test only runs rendering once, but it was designed to all of constant rendering if needed.
• A range of data points can be plotted (instead of the full data set) if so desired.
• Trend methods are available for data analysis (but no specific plotters are built for it yet).

The Charting Engine supports the following types of plots:

• Grouped
  • Bar
  • HorizontalBar
  • Gantt
  • StackedArea
  • StackedCurvedArea
• Individual
  • DataBar
  • Line
  • CurvedLine
  • Area
  • CurvedArea
  • HighLow
  • HighLowClose
  • HighLowOpenClose
  • Scatter
  • Bubble

At some point there will be a full article on how to use the new Charting Engine, but for now, you can take a look at the test page to see it in action.