Google Visualisation API review in 4 words

When I’m not working on Poker Copilot, I still do a couple of days IT consulting per week. For my current gig we’re charting loads of historical statistical data. Exchange rates, GDP, inflation rates, unemployment, all that sort of stuff. The user chooses from any of tens of thousands of series and can compare them in various ways.

Yesterday I took a look at Google’s new Visualisation API. I experimentally added an interactive time-line a la Google Finance to our project. Within a couple of hours I had working interactive charts that worked with any of our data. I also had sortable-within-the-browsable data tables. Most of the time was spent shaping our data in a way that the Google Visualisation API could use it. It was almost embarrassingly simple to add this interactivity to our project within only a couple of dozen lines of JavaScript.