The JIDE Charts is a powerful and flexible charting package that can help the users of your application to understand and explore their data as well as seeing it attractively presented. We have used many different charting components in many different projects, and found them to be of varying quality and usefulness. It was the frustrations with the flexibility of these other components that led directly to the development of JIDE Charts.

We designed JIDE Charts to:

• embrace the Swing MVC approach to offer maximum power and flexibility
• make it possible for a Swing developer to start working with charts within minutes
• generate great looking charts
• support the interactive exploring of data

It supports many different chart types including line plots, scatter plots, bar charts, pie charts and even gauges. As you would expect, it embraces the model-view-controller pattern and has been designed so that you can easily switch from one visual paradigm to another - like switching from a bar chart to a pie chart - with minimal coding effort. As with JTable, the model layer is defined as an interface - which allows for custom implementations when advanced functionality is required - while the default implementation saves time and is very easy to use.

JIDE Charts supports axes for the display of numerical, time-series or categorical data. The concept of a category is very powerful because a Category instance can be created from any object - they do not have to be Strings or enums. So not only can you use an axis to display qualitative values (for example cold, tepid, warm, hot) but also to differentiate between different individuals in a model-driven coding effort. Axes are defined independently, so you can plot a numerical axis against time-series values, categorical against categorical, or any combination you choose.

The visual appearance of charts is highly customizable with choice of colours, shapes and sizes or custom renderers. However, we have already designed some great looking renderers: the points of an XY plot can be rendered as shiny spheres, the bars of a bar chart can be displayed as glossy cylinders or 3d blocks; and a pie chart can be shown in a 3D style. You can easily switch on the intuitive data exploration gesture of zooming and panning with the mouse - all it takes is a single line of code. JIDE Charts supports multiple y axes and has special provision for displaying large datasets without the usual performance drawbacks. It even supports curve fitting for easily discovering the trends in data.

Features

• XY Charts:
  Line Charts, Line-and-Point charts, Scatter Plots and Area Charts;
  Styling of points, lines and bars, including gradient fill background and optional shadow effect
  Optional rendering of points as a 3D sphere
• Bar Charts:
  Vertical or horizontal charts
  Grouped or stacked
  Choice of rendering, including single color fill, raised bar effect, 3D bars or 3D cylinders
• Pie Charts:
  Choice of rendering including single color fill
  "Exploded" segment highlight effect
• Configurable axis positioning
• Numeric, Time, or Categorical axes
• Multiple y axes, independently scalable
• Filtering support
• Nearest-point calculations for easier data exploration
• Least-Squares Curve Fitting
• Mouse-wheel zooming and mouse-drag panning
• "Rubber band" zooming
• Point highlighting and labelling
• Flexible and extensible design based on the well-known Model-View-Controller design pattern
• Supports large datasets through an advanced rendering technique - even a million of data points can be interactively explored by panning and zooming!