Should I use google charts in a production environment [closed]

Question

Should I use google charts in production environment?

Google charts are very easy to use. https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/quick_start But is it recommended to be used in a production environment?

The API's are not hosted in house but called form google servers.

There is a risk of google changing them or discontinuing them.

I couldn't find any license agreement to use.

Is the data secure as the data is being sent to google servers.

Are the above real risks or am I over thinking.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with using google API's in production. Or if anyone can give some recommendations.

Answer 1

The Terms of Service cover some of your questions. Basically, Google's deprecation policy says that the API will be available for 3 years following deprecation (and most of the API - namely, the Interactive Charts API - is not deprecated; the old Image Chart API is, however).

For data security, most charts in the Interactive Charts API do not send any data to Google's servers, though there are exceptions. Each chart's documentation has a Data Policy section which explains what, if any, data is sent to Google (examples: AreaCharts, which do not send any data; and GeoCharts, which may send data if you use the geocoding features). Charts in the Image Chart API do send data to Google's servers, as they generate the images server-side rather than client-side, but this API is deprecated anyway, so you probably shouldn't be using it.

The main risk with using the Visualization API in my experience is that you have (practically) no control over versioning. When the development team releases an update, everyone everywhere gets the update. Usually this is a good thing, as it brings new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements to everyone. Occasionally, however, a new release may introduce a bug, or change the behavior or appearance of a chart in some way that is undesirable for your application. When this happens, you generally cannot roll back to the previous version. For projects that are under active development for long periods of time, this is generally an acceptable trade-off for the free (as in beer) chart API. For projects that do not have a long-term maintenance budget, this can be problematic.

If your user-base is in an area that has poor connectivity to Google's servers, having the API hosted remotely could be problematic, but in general this is not the case.

Answer 2

I have used it in a production environment. All the questions you have posed are very real possibilities. For use it came down to budget, the money was there to purchase a system so we went with what we could afford at the time. The direction you go really depends on budget and existing systems that might be able to achieve the same thing.