Nowadays, more and more data live in the cloud in multiple formats and locations. In light of this trend, visual analysis, the ability to extract key information from the data and present it at a glance, becomes more important. And developers often are the ones tasked with aggregating, parsing, and exposing these data in coherent forms such as dashboards, reports, and charts. Thank goodness for the expressive power of images and graphic representations.
For these new demands, the Google Visualization API offers a unified way for developers to deliver visual analysis and provides a rich set of graphic and charting components to handle the majority of visualization scenarios. The Google Visualization API is a data interchange specification and a set of libraries that developers can use to represent structured data as graphic visualizations and interactive charts inside their web applications. This article describes the recently released API, from its basic concepts to its more advanced parts. You will learn how to embed a simple visualization component into your web pages, how to feed it with data from external sources, and finally how to implement your own data sources to add your data to the dozens of visualizations already available in the public Visualization Gallery.
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