Web Charting, serverside or client side?

Question

I'm trying to establish whether we are better off rendering charts serverside and pushing them to the browser as images or using a javascript charting library to draw the charts clientside.

I'm looking at the JFreeChart and Dojo Charting libraries, my target is an existing JSP site that runs in JBoss.

Does anyone have any experience with this who might be able to point out the merits/flaws of each.

At the moment I'm seeing Client side rendering as being a hell of a lot more efficient unless the dataset is Huge.

Answer 1

I would like to recommend a library I wrote: charts4j which is a server-side charting solution. Here are some features:

• Supports nearly all features of the Google Chart API
• Hides the ugly details of creating the URL parameters that are necessary for communicating with the Google Chart API
• Can be incorporated into any Internet enabled Swing or web application environment (JSP/Servlet, GWT, Spring MVC, etc.)
• 100% pure core Java solution. No need for special graphics libraries, etc.
• Super-scalable & Lightweight. Only one 160Kb jar and an Internet connection required
• Well documented
• Best of all, it is FREE!

Here are some testimonials. Also check out the FAQ.

I have an example of incorporating this technology into a Spring MVC (using JSPs) app on my blog.