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REVIEW

Chart Part

Issue: 3.5 (May/June 2005)
Author: Greg Fiumara
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,636
Starting Page Number: 8
Article Number: 3503
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.redlien.com/realbasic/chartingpicture/

Excerpt of article text...

Every once in a while there is a code example that really strikes me. Chart Part from Corey Redlien is a development example that is both visually and functionally stunning.

Originally created for use with his phenomenal application, Redlien Account Executive, Redlien has decided to benefit the REALbasic community by releasing Chart Part as well as several other code snippets under the LGPL. This means that developers can view the source code and use it in their own applications under certain conditions. Chart Part is a new solution to graphing with REALbasic. Supplied with a set of data, Chart Part can create remarkable bar, line, and pie graphs on the fly.

Giving Chart Part the information to plot is the "hardest part" of the entire graphing process. Simply pass a value, caption, color, and label for each point to be plotted and Redlien's hardworking code will handle the rest. Redlien even completes the entire trigonometric math involved with pie graphs to create professional looking results. If you want to further customize the graph, you may pass a title and even a way to format the points to be plotted, such as with currency values.

Although these graphs look good by themselves, this code is open source, so one can easily change their appearance to better fit the appearance of a company or any other setting.

Another benefit to open source software is the ability to learn from the code and mistakes of others. Chart Part is listed on Source Forge, a giant open source community. One can view earlier versions as well as comments and changes from other Chart Part users. In addition, most of the code in this project contains comments so developers can educate themselves as they follow along in Redlien's code. Aside from the code comments, there is no documentation that comes along with the example project.

Redlien indicates that there is still much that can be added to Chart Part with a minimal amount of effort, however, the project has not been updated from its 2.0b1 state since almost one year ago. In fact, Redlien indicates the only major change from version 1 to version 2 is that the graph is now drawn to a picture object instead of directly to canvas. Although this does provide the end developer with more ways to manipulate the graph, Redlien has not made any examples of this public.

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